Webmasters of the late 90s, building fan pages
If you were building a GeoCities website in the late 1990s or burning CDs in the early 2000s, the chances are high that you encountered a MIDI rendition of the main theme from the 1992 film. It is a piece of music that defied the limitations of its technology, capturing the grandeur of a Hollywood blockbuster using nothing but math and synthesizer chips.
The melody is deceptively simple. It relies on a repetitive, driving rhythm that evokes the running of feet, the beat of a heart, or the rush of a river. This simplicity was the key to its success in the digital realm. Complex jazz improvisations or layered rock songs often translated poorly into MIDI, becoming muddy and unrecognizable. But the rhythmic clarity of "The Last of the Mohicans" made it an ideal candidate for transcription. For the uninitiated, MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It is crucial to understand that a MIDI file is not an audio recording. It does not contain sound waves. Instead, it contains data. Think of it as a digital roll of player piano paper. It tells the computer what note to play, when to play it, how loud to play it, and what instrument to imitate.