Why Does MIDI Offer 127 Notes

Question

Is the 127 note values in MIDI musically significant (certain number of octaves or something)? or was it set at 127 due to the binary file format, IE for the purposes of computi

Answer 1

I think what you are missing is that MIDI was created in the early 1980's, not to run on personal computers, but to run on musical instruments with extremely limited processing and storage capabilities. Storing 127 values seemed GIANT back then, especially when the largest keyboard typically has only 88 keys, and most electronic instruments only had 48. If you think MIDI is doing something in a strange way, it is likely that stems from its jurassic heritage.

Yes it is true that typically a pitch value of 60 will give you C4, or middle C. Most synths work this way, but certainly not all.

Yes ... there has always been a disagreement about where middle C is in MIDI. On Yamaha keyboards it is C3, on Roland keyboards it is C4. Yamaha did it one way and Roland did it another.

Now, these pitch values do not correspond to specific pitches.

Not originally. However, in the "General MIDI" standard, A = 440, which is standard tuning. General MIDI also describes which patch is a piano, which is a guitar, and so on, so that MIDI files become portable across multitimbral sound sources.