Ryan Diduck Mad Skills MIDI and Music Technology in the Twentieth Century

A history of electronic music that goes way beyond the Moog

Part rigorous history, part insightful commentary, and part memoir, Mad Skills tells the story behind MIDI, aka the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, through the twentieth century's kaleidoscopic lens.

Guiding us across one hundred years of musical instruments, and the music made with them, Mad Skills recounts the technical and creative innovations that led to the making of the most vital, long-standing, ubiquitous, and yet invisible music technology of our time.