Dave Smith

Dave Smith founded Sequential Circuits in the mid-70s. In 1977, he designed the Prophet-5, the first microprocessor-based musical instrument. The first polyphonic and programmable synthesizer. In 1981 he set out to create a standard protocol for communication between electronic musical instruments from different manufacturers worldwide. In 1981 after meetings with Tom Oberheim and Ikutaro Kakehashi he presented a paper outlining the idea of a universal synthesizer interface to the Audio Engineering Society (AES). After some enhancements and revisions, the new standard was introduced at the 1983 NAMM Show as "Musical Instrument Digital Interface" (MIDI). In 1987 he was named a Fellow of the AES.

Currently he is designing electronic musical instruments at his new company, Dave Smith Instruments.