Dave Smith, an electronics pioneer whose creations of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) and the Prophet 5 synthesizer revolutionized popular music, died in Detroit. He was 72 and experienced a heart attack while attending the Movement electronic music festival, which ran May 28-30.
Smith began creating instruments in the mid-1970s while working in the aerospace industry. He bought a Minimoog synthesizer and built his own sequencer to program it. That became the Model 600, which allowed musicians to program melodic and rhythmic patterns.
He founded his own company, Sequential Circuits, in 1974, and it is still operating in San Francisco at the time of his death.
The Prophet-5 was the world’s first fully programmable polyphonic synthesizer that used a microprocessor. It came out in 1978 and was used by Michael Jackson and Kraftwerk, among others.
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