Over the last two years, the World Wide Web has transformed itself from a repository for scientific papers to an energetic and creative mass medium. This change has been driven by a synergy between art and technology best described by a simple principle: If new technology is free, the artists of the world will use it, and it will be cool. We soon see a blizzard of new pages, with a blizzard of new looks, expressing a blizzard of new ideas.
Just like Planet Earth in the 90's, 100-year storms seem to hit the Web every few months. This season's 100-year storm is Java, a technology that will bring not only new looks to the Web, but new rhythms and new sounds. Enter MIDI.
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Although Java is an efficient and powerful language, writing something as complex as a multitrack sequencer is a lot of work, and it will be many months at least before we see MIDI applets of great power. But Java is catching on very quickly, and we should expect to see MIDI bird tweets and symbol crashes show up quickly once a standard interface is available.
(from this archived ~1997 essay; emphases mine)