About General Midi - Yamaha QY22 Owner's Manual

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The QY22: What It Is & What It Can Do

About General MIDI

The QY22 is fully compatible with the General MIDI System Level 1 Standard.
As you probably know, MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) makes it possi-
ble for various electronic musical instruments and other devices to "communicate" with
each other. For example, by connecting a sequencer to a synthesizer, you can play back
a songs data on the sequencer using the voices of the synthesizer.
But until General MIDI came along, the problem has been that voice assignments
had never been standardized. So, if you were to create a song using tone generator A's
piano voice and then play it back on tone generator B, it might be played back as an
organ voice. This is because each company has used it's own voice assignments in it's
products.
The General MIDI Level 1 Standard was developed to solve this problem. The most
important feature of General MIDI is the standardization of voices. This means that a
song recorded in the General MIDI format can be played back on any General MIDI
compatible tone generator and sound just as the composer had intended.
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