One of the things to watch out for with protocols such as MIDI and derivatives is that they have no way to validate communications. If you are not careful a system can very easily fall into a situation known in computer science as "The Two Generals Problem":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem
At a minimum, the receiver must be able to validate a message without anything other than the message itself. This typically moves towards the use of CRC (cyclic redundancy check) along with other validators. While simple checksums are sometimes uses, I would be very careful and would not use them for anything critical.
Put another way: Give me a 100 foot RS-232 cable and I'll show you what pain and misery looks like as you try to figure out why the data is great at the sending end of the cable and complete garbage at the other end. Anyone old enough to know what a tape degausser was? Yeah. I had someone at work ripping their hair out for nearly a week trying to figure out why he could not get reliable communications.
Before you think "that was cruel", six month earlier they wired a variac to my workbench. Had me going for a week as they messed with the voltage going to the equipment I was testing as well as my test instruments.
