Once you saw it that way, machine vision looked less like sight and more like pattern matching—the same trick those early text programs had been using with words. The data had changed, but the idea hadn’t.
That thought was still rattling around in my head when I arrived at the conference.
I was bored.
The attendees—in their gray suits, gray complexions, and ties—looked like they would rather be someplace else. After a few hours wandering past conveyor belts, inspection cameras, and robot arms moving parts around, the whole place began to feel heavy.
I called a friend back in Boston and told him I was anxious to get home.
He said there was another conference going on at McCormick Place that might be a good change of scene. He had heard there was a lot of interest in how computers might be used in the music industry and thought I should check it out.
“Give me a couple of hours,” he said. “I’ll get you a pass.”
NAMM was a different world.
Where the robotics show had been quiet and cautious, NAMM was loud and chaotic. Electric guitars wailed from one booth while drum kits thundered from another. Synthesizers made sounds that seemed to come from distant planets. Violin makers stood beside Steinways while instrument designers demonstrated things nobody had quite seen before. Some people had purple hair. Others wore silk tights. Early mobile phones hung from shoulder bags like field radios.
It was impossible not to smile.
Instead of engineers worrying about inspection tolerances and yield, people were arguing about tone, rhythm, and sound. Everywhere musicians were experimenting with electronic instruments that were beginning to reshape how music could be created.
That evening I crashed a private party where B. B. King was sitting in the corner playing his beloved guitar, Lucille. For a while the room went quiet except for the sound of that instrument.
The next morning, wandering the convention floor again, I noticed a handwritten sign taped to a door.
Birds of a Feather — Computers and Music.
Curiosity has always been a weakness of mine, so I walked in.
Inside the room were musicians, engineers, and instrument manufacturers trying to solve a problem that had quietly emerged as electronic instruments multiplied. Every synthesizer manufacturer had invented its own way of communicating with computers. If you wanted to connect devices from different companies, you were usually out of luck.
The people in that room understood musical instruments, but very few knew much about computer networking. What they wanted was simple: a way for all those instruments to talk to each other.
Three days later I walked out as a co-sponsor of what would soon become the Musical Instrument Digital Interface protocol—MIDI.
Suddenly I had a new project and needed some new toys.
I called friends at Apple and talked them into sending me a pre-release version of their newest computer, the Macintosh. A marketing guy from Yamaha who had been in the meeting offered to ship me one of their new DX7 synthesizers.
Both arrived just as I returned home to Boston.
My wife and kids were visiting her parents in a summer rental on Cape Cod. I drove down and walked into the house carrying a small beige computer and an electronic keyboard. I set everything up for development on the kitchen table.