A survey of real-time MIDI performance

Although MIDI is often used for computer-based interac-tive music applications, its real-time performance is rarely quantified, despite concerns about whether it is capable of adequate performance in realistic settings. We extend exist-ing proposals for MIDI performance benchmarking so they are useful in realistic interactive scenarios, including those with heavy MIDI traffic and CPU load. We have produced a cross-platform freely-available testing suite that is easy to use, and have used it to survey the interactive performance of several commonly-used computer/MIDI setups. We de-scribe the suite, summarize the results of our performance survey, and detail the benefits of this testing methodology. 1