Agreed. This reminds me of a few discussions i saw about unicode being silly and over the top and that ascii is perfectly functional. Non english languages can work around the spec!
Tell how western-centric they were to those Japanese engineers from Yamaha, Roland, Korg and Kawai who worked on MIDI 1.0 specs.
Japanese traditional music is primarily pentatonic or heptatonic and aligns closely to western 12-tone equal temperament. Contemporary Japanese music is entirely compatible with western music theory. That's a happy coincidence for a Japanese-American project, but it's distinctly inconvenient for Arabic, Persian or Indonesian musicians who use notes that have no useful equivalent in the western scale.
This is very much a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" type of situation - what western engineers perceive as an insignificant edge case is a constant frustration for many non-western musicians. The answer to the question "How do I play music from my own culture using electronic instruments?" should not be "Well, it's complicated...". Support for non-western scales should not be a clumsy, optional part of the spec.
https://www.midi.org/articles/microtuning-and-alternative-in...