ABSTRACT
MIDI (see Chapter 25, on page 255) was adopted by the professional sound industry soon after its introduction in 1983, since the sound and music businesses have always been intertwined. Many musical MIDI messages are well suited to sound control-a program change command applies as well to an audio processor as it does a musical synthesizer. The entertainment lighting industry jumped on the MIDI bandwagon in the late 1980s, with musical-equipment manufacturers such as Sunn, which made club and small touring lighting systems, leading the way. Other companies such as Electronic Theatre Controls and Strand, and moving light companies such as Vari*Lite, soon caught on. However, standard MIDI messages don’t translate easily to disciplines like lighting control: What musical MIDI message do you use to initiate a cue? How do you control a submaster? How do you fire a macro? How do you set a grand master level?
