A Quantitative Study of Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) Over Internet Protocol (IP) Protocols

Abstract

The research, which is discussed in this dissertation, consists of the development and testing of a suite of ten Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and reliable Real Time Protocol (RTP) MIDI over IP (MOIP) protocols, and the subsequent implementations of musical duet collaboration systems based on the MOIP protocols. These MOIP protocols were subjected to a quantitative and statistically significant set of experiments using two experimental metrics or performance measurements. The statistical protocol winner of these experiments was used in the duet systems. We implemented the musical duet systems on two different hardware platforms with different and competing operating systems. The general hardware and software architectures of the musical duet collaboration systems were essentially platform independent. The procedural programming language C and the object-oriented programming language Java were utilized. Before a path leading to a modicum of success was found a number of roads to unsuitable protocols were explored and these lanes to nowhere are also discussed extensively in this dissertation.