MIDI’s cousin RS-422 existed in a technical environment but probably enjoys as much use as MIDI but technicians have many protocols to choose from. the artist just needs to get it speak MIDI to feel in control and the artist generally has fewer stakeholders, which I believe helps maintain continuity of an implementation.
RS-422 is a differential electrical interface standard, while MIDI specifies both a current loop electrical interface and a high level protocol, the latter of which is probably its most defining characteristic today as MIDI can run over any serial interface. Today most commonly it runs over USB or its own current loop signaling, and has less commonly in the past been used over RS-232 or RS-422 from time to time. This is to say, it’s a stretch that MIDI and RS-422 are cousins. (Standard MIDI interfaces typically seen with the 5 pin DIN connector are not RS-422 if that is what you’re thinking)
I remember a project that I used either 422 or 485 as jumping off point for MIDI because I thought at the time that MIDI grew from the spec.
https://support.roland.com/hc/en-us/articles/201951959-PMA-5...
That you can run the MIDI protocol over RS-422 is no more notable than that you can run it over smoke signals or semaphores. In practice almost every common short to medium range interconnect has been used commercially for MIDI at some point, including SCSI, Ethernet, bespoke fiber in addition to what was already said.
RS-422 is a specification at the physical/electrical layer.
MIDI is a protocol at the logical layer.
You can transmit MIDI over RS-422.
However you cannot transmit RS-422 over MIDI. That makes no logical sense. Like saying you could transmit a chicken sandwich over HTTP.
I’ve used MIDI “as paint”.
Written music using code to MIDI(1), and wrote “cross instrument” music, ie using my keyboard as drum machine.
But these days MIDI is chiefly an archival method for me.
Every time I touch my keyboard is recorded, is much smaller than a comparable audio recording, by design “forced fidelity” in the recording, the music is “searchable”, and I am able to pipe the MIDI format through transcription software (which would be near impossible from an audio recording today).
Because it was the CSO the biggest part of the budget went to sample cards that played instruments up to the conductors standard. Each exhibit could create a composition and play it back like a symphony.
Unsure if this comment was a refutation of my own or just a fun cherry on top anecdote, but in case I was unclear I was trying to say that “I completely agree with the shorthand of calling midi ‘paint’, AND here’s a cool use case that I think is fundamental to the technology but rarely held up as a benefit of said technology, namely archiving and assisted transcription of musical composition.”