[officeplant]

The companies that came together to make MIDI all had analog polysynths capable of true polyphony before the MIDI standard was even finished. (distinct osc/amp/filter outputs per note and not just paraphonic synths that shared AMP/Filter circuits between OSCs)

MIDI was more about unifying the entire studio of synths, samplers, drum machines, and recording equipment. And creating interoperability between various manufacturers of music equipment. It was a solution to the multiple control voltage standards that predated it and made it troublesome to tie equipment together.

[Earw0rm]

Yep, and not forgetting that serial ports on a computer were (at the time) expensive, and the sounds most synths were capable of were.. kind of simple. So there was the motivation for stacking multiple synths up to produce bigger/richer sound, doing keyboard splits (possible on some hardware of the time but not most), as well as driving many devices from a single port.

Multi timbral synths (different sounds addressable per MIDI channel) were a later thing too, analog polysynths could play more than one voice, but very few could play more than maybe two different _sounds_ at once.

[bluGill]

Right but the conversations started before then.