Dave Smith

Smith was born on April 2, 1950, in San Francisco. He had a music background from playing piano at home and in bands at college, and had degrees in both Computer Science and Electronic Engineering from UC Berkeley.

Sequential Circuits and Prophet-5

He purchased a Minimoog in 1972 and later built his own analog sequencer, founding Sequential Circuits in 1974 and advertising his product for sale in Rolling Stone. By 1977 he was working at Sequential full-time, and later that year he designed the Prophet-5, the world's first microprocessor-based musical instrument and also the first programmable polyphonic synth, an innovation that marked a crucial step forward in synthesizer design and functionality. Sequential went on to become one of the most successful music synthesizer manufacturers of the time.

MIDI

In 1981 Smith set out to create a standard protocol for communication between electronic musical instruments from different manufacturers worldwide. Dave Smith and Chet Wood presented a paper outlining the idea of a Universal Synthesizer Interface (USI) to the Audio Engineering Society (AES) in 1981, after meetings with Tom Oberheim and Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi. After some enhancements and revisions, the new standard was introduced as "Musical Instrument Digital Interface" (MIDI) at the Winter NAMM Show in 1983, when a Sequential Circuits Prophet-600 was successfully connected to a Roland Jupiter-6. In 1987 he was named a Fellow of the AES for his continuing work in the area of music synthesis.

In 2005, Smith was inducted into the Mix Foundation TECnology (Technical Excellence and Creativity) Hall of Fame for the MIDI specification. In 2013, he and the Japanese businessman Ikutaro Kakehashi, the president of Roland Corporation, received a Technical Grammy Award for their contributions to the development of MIDI. In 2022, the Guardian wrote that MIDI remained as important to music as USB was to computing, and represented "a crucial value system of cooperation and mutual benefit, one all but thrown out by today's major tech companies in favour of captive markets". As of 2022, Smith's original MIDI design was still in use.

Smith was born in San Francisco, California, to Peter B. Smith and Lucretia Papagni Smith. His father was also a San Francisco native. His mother's family came from Italian grape growers and winemakers who had immigrated to Fresno. He had five siblings. Smith's father died in 1972, and his mother died in 2021.

After college studies in Berkeley, Smith lived and worked in San Jose in the 1970s. He was physically active, competing in the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii, and hiking tall mountains with his friend Roger Linn—another synth pioneer. Smith married Denise White, and in 1988 they moved to St. Helena, California. They had two children, Haley and Campbell. Smith died of a heart attack on May 31, 2022, at the age of 72, in Detroit, Michigan, where he was attending the Movement electronic festival.