In 2013, he and Japanese engineer Ikutaro Kakehashi (founder of Roland and Boss Corporation) received a Technical Grammy Award for their contributions to the development of MIDI as its primary co-inventors.
[3] He had a music background from playing piano at home and in bands at college, and had degrees in both Computer Science and Electronic Engineering from UC Berkeley.
He presented a paper outlining the idea of a Universal Synthesizer Interface (USI) to the Audio Engineering Society (AES) in 1981 after meetings with Tom Oberheim and Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi.
After some enhancements and revisions, the new standard was introduced as "Musical Instrument Digital Interface" (MIDI) at the Winter NAMM Show in 1983, when a Sequential Circuits Prophet-600 was successfully connected to a Roland Jupiter-6.
[9] In 2013, he and the Japanese businessman Ikutaro Kakehashi, the president of Roland Corporation, received a Technical Grammy Award for their contributions to the development of MIDI.
[10] In 2022, the Guardian wrote that MIDI remained as important to music as USB was to computing, and represented "a crucial value system of cooperation and mutual benefit, one all but thrown out by today’s major tech companies in favour of captive markets".
[2] After Sequential, Smith was President of DSD, Inc, a Research and Development Division of Yamaha, where he worked on physical modeling synthesis and software synthesizer concepts.
[6] He was physically active, competing in the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii, and hiking tall mountains with his friend Roger Linn—another synth pioneer.