Invented in the 1980s, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, aka MIDI, allowed professional musicians to add electronic instruments into the mix of records for the first time. This started a wave of new electronic instrument developments - most famously the synthesizer and sampler.

Part rigorous history, part insightful commentary, and part memoir, Mad Skills tells the story behind MIDI, through the twentieth century’s kaleidoscopic lens.

Guiding us across one hundred years of musical instruments, and the music made with them, it 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.