Dave Smith (1950?-) is an electronics engineer and musician responsible for several influential innovations and companies in electronic music. Smith founded Sequential Circuits in 1975, and in 1977 he and John Bowen designed the Prophet-5, the world's first polyphonic synth with proper patch memory. In 1981, several manufacturers including Sequential had had introduced communications interfaces that allowed for their synths to be remote controlled by external keyboards or sequencers. Smith met up with Roland's Ikutaro Kakehashi at an Audio Engineering Society conference and they laid out the concept of a manufacturer-independent control system, which resulted in the MIDI standard.