In the early 1980s music went digital three ways at once: instruments learned a common language, records became numbers on a disc, and the studio began moving into a computer.
MIDI
Before MIDI, instruments from different makers could not easily talk to each other. Roland's president Ikutaro Kakehashi thought this lack of a standard was holding the industry back, and with Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits worked on a simpler, cheaper connection; Smith talked to American companies, Kakehashi to Yamaha, Korg and Kawai. MIDI was standardised in 1983 by a panel of industry representatives. MIDI 2.0 followed in 2020.
The compact disc
Philips and Sony developed the compact disc together. It was first released in Japan in October 1982. A standard CD is 120 mm across and holds up to 74 minutes of audio, stored as two channels of 16-bit PCM at a 44.1 kHz sampling rate: the "CD quality" that is still a reference. By the 1980s digital media had a larger share than the vinyl record, which left the mainstream in 1991.
The digital audio workstation
In 1978 Soundstream, maker of one of the first commercial digital tape recorders, built what could be called the first DAW, on a DEC PDP-11/60 minicomputer. Engineers later edited samples on computers with software such as Digidesign's Sound Tools. After Digidesign brought out Pro Tools in 1991, modelled on the signal flow of analogue studios, many major studios switched to digital audio.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1978 | Soundstream's Digital Editing System, an early DAW |
| 1982 | The CD goes on sale in Japan |
| 1983 | MIDI standardised |
| 1991 | Pro Tools; the vinyl record leaves the mainstream |
| 2020 | MIDI 2.0 |
Why it matters to a producer
Every DAW on your laptop is MIDI, CD-quality audio and the multitrack tape machine of lesson 7, combined in software.
Sources
Every date, name, tempo and origin on this page comes from these pages, read on 2026-10-24.