My, where did the years go...
Good times.
There is no "correct" sound for a MIDI file as it's just note and tempo data. But many people probably associate them with the OPL2 synthesizer chip on AdLib and early SoundBlaster cards. [1]
Now that we have high fidelity digital sound output on even the cheapest computers/devices, at least 44 kHz, at least two channels, and at least 16 bits per sample, we can emulate (or play a recording of) anything.
[1] Personally I remember this midi file sounding different/better. Maybe because I'm remembering using a Sound Blaster AWE64 while playing these things in Windows?
In the case of canyon.mid there is because it was composed for a specific midi instrument with a particular set of timbres.
Or to put it another way, it’s music and therefore complicated.
QRS is still in business and some of its product lines use Midi conversions of piano rolls and last month I landed a mixed lot with a bunch of those Midi files on 3.5” floppy disks.
I had George Gershwin rocking a Yamaha XG clavichord and Liberace on a Sitar and similar shenanigans.
In particular, think of how this would play out if you had never heard that song before, would that be what you were after?
I was thinking about retelling the story I wanted to retell.
Thinking about writing.
The banjo was just an excuse.
I didn’t hear it.
I am reminded of Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum, which let the PC speaker output something beyond just bleeps and bloops.
General MIDI as a format basically died for serious computer use in the early 2000's. It's still a feature of some home keyboards and things, but it is a case where they genuinely do not “make them like they used to”. If you want the greatest possible GM support, you have to buy old hardware from e.g. the Roland Sound Canvas or Yamaha MU series, or obtain old software (no longer sold) like Roland Sound Canvas VA or Yamaha S-YXG50.
Although I have to admit the cheesy versions do sound more familiar to me because I certainly had the most cheapo-grade sound hardware in any 90s PC I had access to.
I also want to point to Nuked SC-55, but that is also not based on SoundFont®.
It seems like a missing market for vendors to directly support better sound fonts for Windows, maybe we'd see more files written for it again. But also, there's some sense that most of the best written General MIDI files for direct consumption were always the ones for videogames and it has been left as a matter for emulation for that reason as videogames themselves moved on to different tech.
Still though, there's something about loading Monkey Island 2 with a Roland MT-32 era sound font in DREAMM and experiencing what it does with "live" MIDI instrumentation that modern games wish they could do, and sounds nearly as good doing it. For certain values of nearly, of course. Redbook audio gave us all the lovely little "mistakes" of live band things like jazz performances that MIDI could never quite replicate in the same way. I wouldn't necessarily trade modern orchestration for MIDI in all cases, but it is easy for me to imagine that it might be great to see both side-by-side and the best of both in interactive media, best tool for each job style.
There's also a "correct" sound insofar that the tracks were usually arranged using one sound module or another. Even when devices are compatible in the sense that they have adopted the same standard, hearing music on another device than the one the soundtrack was originally arranged for will cause some degradation, because the standards are only loosely specified in terms of timbre, volume levels, envelopes etc.
Some DOS games have specific arrangements for a variety of different kinds of MIDI devices for these reasons, with different mix levels and instrument setup, sometimes scaled down arrangements, adjustments for the instrument patches and even loading entirely new patches onto the devices.
Finally, “high fidelity” is not a synonym for “musical.”
The great thing about MIDI is that it is easily routable to any number of things (physical instruments, samplers, etc.).
Being able to listen to Sonic 2 - Chemical Zone with a combination of a Minimoog Model D and a Jun-6 (basically a Juno-6) is unbelievably fun.
If you've heard music from the Sega Genesis, that's the same Yamaha FM Synthesis technology (details differ, of course).
So, games would often support different audio hardware. Here's a favorite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ (Secret of Monkey Island theme, PC Speaker)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qpB-HAZsRs (Secret of Monkey Island theme, Adlib/OPL2/FM synthesis, common option for PC sound hardware)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dB0qEcG20 (Secret of Monkey Island theme, Roland MT-32/Linear Arithmetic synthesis, premium hardware, likely what the music was originally composed for)
You may enjoy chiptunes. Wikipedia has samples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptune (see: Contemporary chiptune music)
https://assets.superhivemarket.com/store/product/190602/imag...
It was one of those moments where computers blew my 8 year old mind, I was never the same.