That said, turning MIDI into audio is a pain ... the SAM2695 from Dream Sound Synthesis. This chip was originally designed for cheap toy keyboards, but if you have a chip, you can do anything ...

For example, if one of the channels (patches) is a piano, up to 10 fingers could strike the keyboard at the same time, generating 10 notes. Quality sound cards and synthesizers support 64 MIDI ...

One of 16 channels in a MIDI device. Many keyboard synthesizers and MIDI sound modules can handle several waveforms per patch, mixing different instruments together to create synthetic sounds.