Public voting for the MIDI Innovation Awards 2026 opened on 8 September and runs until 22 September, when the finalists are handed to the judging panel for final ranking. Anyone can vote, no account is required, and the whole thing takes under a minute.

Now in their sixth year, the awards are a joint venture between The MIDI Association, NAMM and Music Hackspace. Their stated purpose is to draw attention to products — commercial and non-commercial alike — that use MIDI in genuinely interesting ways. In practice, that has made them one of the few industry showcases where a solo developer's prototype sits alongside products from established manufacturers and gets judged on the same terms.

The Categories

Entries were accepted in six categories this year:

The MIDI 2.0 category is the notable addition. It arrives at a point where MIDI 2.0 has moved from specification documents into shipping firmware, operating systems and DAWs, and where the relationship between MIDI 2.0 and MPE has become one of the more debated topics among expressive-instrument builders.

Eligibility ran to products created — or substantially upgraded — after 15 July 2025. Registration closed on 1 September after an extension from the original July deadline. The full terms and conditions are published on the MIDI Association site.

Why This Matters for Expressive Instruments

The awards have a track record of surfacing exactly the kind of work that the mainstream gear press tends to skip. Small-run expressive controllers, unconventional interfaces, accessibility-focused instruments, visualisation tools and research prototypes have all found audiences through the process in previous years. Several MPE controllers that are now well known first reached a wider audience via an awards nomination.

That is partly a function of the voting structure. Public voting narrows the field, but judges rank the finalists — which means a well-designed niche instrument is not automatically buried by a mass-market product with a bigger mailing list. It also means the public vote is genuinely worth casting, because it determines which projects reach the judges at all.

For the MPE community specifically, the prototype categories are usually the most rewarding to browse. Per-note expression remains a design space where most of the interesting ideas come from very small teams: alternative key layouts, isomorphic grids, touch surfaces, breath and gesture interfaces, and software that translates between control paradigms. A quick pass through the entries is one of the better annual snapshots of where expressive control is actually heading.

How to Vote

Voting is hosted on the MIDI Association's awards page. You browse the entries — each with a short video — and cast votes in the categories you care about. There is no registration wall and no requirement to vote in every category.

A few practical notes. Voting closes on 22 September 2026, and the winners announcement date is still listed as TBD, following the pattern of previous years where results were revealed at a dedicated online show. Sound On Sound has been tracking the key dates as they shift.

If you play an MPE controller, the honest recommendation is to watch the entry videos before voting rather than voting on brand recognition. Expressive instruments are difficult to evaluate from a spec sheet — the whole point is what happens between the player's hand and the sound — and the video format is well suited to showing that. It is also, incidentally, one of the better ways to discover instruments you did not know existed.

Looking Ahead

The addition of a MIDI 2.0 category is a reasonable signal of where the ecosystem's attention sits. MIDI 2.0's per-note controllers and higher-resolution data offer a technically cleaner route to the things MPE achieves through channel rotation, but adoption is uneven and MPE remains the practical standard across DAWs, plugins and hardware today. Seeing which MIDI 2.0 products the community actually rewards this year will say something useful about how fast that picture is changing.

Voting is open now and closes on 22 September.