Yamaha CVP-206 Owner's Manual - Page 151

Using Your Clavinova with Other Devices What's MIDI? Let's consider an acoustic piano and a classical guitar as representative acoustic instruments. With the piano, you strike a key, and a hammer inside hits some strings and plays a note. With the guitar, you directly pluck a string and the note sounds. But how does a digital instrument go about playing a note? Acoustic guitar note production Digital instrument note production L Internal amp Tone generator Internal amp (Electric circuit) R Pluck a string and the body resonates the sound. Playing the keyboard Based on playing information from the keyboard, a sampled note stored in the tone generator is played through the speakers. Recording and playing back the performance of a digital instrument (MIDI data) Recording Playback Controller (keyboard, etc.) FD Tone generator Sequencer FD In the case of digital instruments, the audio signals are sent through output jacks (such as AUX OUT) on the instrument. As shown in the illustration above, in an electronic instrument, the sampled note (previously recorded note) stored in the tone generator section (electronic circuit) is played based on information received from the keyboard, and output through the speakers. Now let's examine what happens when we play back a recording. When you playback a music CD (for example, a solo piano recording), you're hearing the actual sound (vibrations in air) of the acoustic instrument. This is called audio data, to distinguish it from MIDI data. Recording and playing back the performance of an acoustic instrument (audio data) Recording Playback In the above example, the actual acoustic sounds of the pianist's performance are captured in the recording as audio data, and this is recorded to CD. When you play back that CD on your audio system, you can hear the actual piano performance. The piano itself is not necessary, since the recording contains the actual sounds of the piano, and your speakers reproduce them. CVP-206/204 151