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Chicago Today Magazine

July 9, 1972
The Synthesizer Sound
By Roderick Nordell

From tuba to piccolo at the flip of a switch In Milan, Italy, a dancer turns movement into sound by performing before a camera whose film has been replaced by photocells that feed into an electronic music synthesizer.
In an American recording studio, a tired trumpeter's lip is too shot to hit a crucial high note, so a synthesizer duplicates it for him.
At our house, a seventh grader plays hymns on a synthesizer when circumstances prevent the family from going to church. And when the last of the big bandy assembles to practice in our basement, the synthesizer-fills in for a miming flute and electric piano.
"This is the 'bungling detective' music," said one of the boys, his left hand grumbling on the piano and his right composing a rhythmic electronic melody on the synthesizer for a movie being made at school.
When this writer first brought a borrowed synthesizer home and, ladies
and gentlemen, gave his impression of Tommy Dorsey's trombone playing "Getting Sentimental Over You," the next sound you heard was a breaking heart. I had been more or less aware of synthesizers for the last two decades of their development. But I didn't realize that electronic music had become so "taken for granted" that, for some schools, purchasing a synthesizer is "like buying another tuba."
Yet this is the way the synthesizer scene looks to young David Friend, engineer, composer, and vice president of ARP Instruments. Tucked away on a rutted dirt road in Newton Highlands, Mass., not far from Boston, this 2-year- old company has become, by its own estimate, currently the largest manufacturer of synthesizers. It claims some 60 per cent of a market sought by English and-Finnish as well as American firms.
Recently it introduced the Odyssey, latest example of a trend bringing synthesizers down from the expensive, complex, studio-filling size to the grasp of ordinary mortals.
For those to whom synthesizers have been synonymous with the- pioneering Moog, the Odyssey is in some ways roughly comparable to the Mini-Moog. The Odyssey sells for about $1,000 and is intended primarily for schools and rock groups, to which it can add sounds similar to conventional instruments plus a whole electronic palette subject only to the performer's creativity. A Harvard psychological study of creativity influenced some of Friend's thinking in developing the ARP 2500, the $10,000 granddaddy of the Odyssey, with the $2,500 ARP 2600 as a kind of middle generation.
The Harvard study suggested that creativity involved the production of many random ideas and then a discriminating selection from among those ideas. Pointing to the multiplicity of dials and switches on the panel of the 2500, Friend told how a set it up to produce an endless flow of random note options from which the synthesizer would then "choose" the ones to be actually sounded. The choice could be narrowly defined, so that only certain predetermined notes would be chosen, or loosely defined so that any one of several notes would be acceptable.

 

The synthesizer's freedom to improvise, so to speak, means that it can become a kind of fellow musician to a performer like Roger Poweil, ARP's, "composer-in-residence," on a forthcoming record and in a recent one-man, multisynthesizer concert-billed as the first of its kind-at Boston University. Like a player in a jazz-band, Powell can respond on another instrument or another synthesizer to what the first synthesizer unexpectedly does. But then he can also readjust the first synthesizer to make its responses fit what he wants to do, which is not always possible with another jazz man in the flesh.
Friend deplores "gimmick" synthesizer recordings-a category from which he exempts the celebrated "Switch-On Bach" a la Moog. He looks forward to Powell's disk, which represents what he thinks the future holds for electronic sounds-that is, the use of them along with the sounds of conventional instru- ments as the normal, expected resources available to the composer and performer.
Friend sees infinite possibilities for interaction between the two sorts of instruments. Already, he said, electronic music has-influenced composers to look afresh at conventional instruments, using unexpected sounds they can produce (with the instruments sometimes partially dismantled) in addition to their familiar tones. He illustrated the identity between an electronically produced "wow" sound, gliding thru a range of frequencies, and a "wow" sound produced by the mouth and lips for which singers were trained to slide over a range of frequencies in a work by the avant-garde composer Stockhausern.
Instruments can also interact with synthesizers by providing an input which, like that old music goes 'round and 'round and comes out here. Most synthesizers now have piano-like keyboards. But ARP is readying ones that will be activated by guitars and saxophones. Synthesizers can also be activated by the human voice-and, as shown by that dancer in a Milan experimental theater, by vibrations in light.

Electric organs, too, will eventually be filled with synthesizer technology even though they may look the same on the outside, said Friend. At the moment this technology is too expensive to replace the organ's ability to play chords, for example. Though the new Odyssey permits the playing of two notes at a time, synthesizers ordinarily play one at a time, as brass and woodwind solo instruments do. It is by taping separate musical lines-and then combining the tapes into one-that the typical synthesizer "performance" has been put together.
Meanwhile, synthesizers are being used in music education by more and More universities, colleges, and high schools. Citing Yale University and New York's School for Social Research as examples, Friend said that electronic music courses are oversubscribed as soon as they are set up.
ARP's big 2500 dropped off in sales as the smaller 2600 spurted to meet the widened market. Now, the 2500 is climbing again, and Friend reasoned that it may be due to demand in college by students who have already been exposed to smaller synthesizers in high school.
Or possibly even in the home, which brings us back to our house and the ARP Soloist synthesizer that we lived with for several weeks. This is a model that went on the market for $1,195 last fall and is now being distributed as far from Newton Highlands as Singapore, Greece, South Africa, Japan, and Australia.
It looks like a three-octave keyboard in a slim, neat box. It can be easily carried in what looks like an elongated sax case. It plays through a hi-fi, guitar amplifier, or organ (with which it is often accompanied, though not at our house)

When our seventh grade guitar player and his bass-playing sidekick came home from school the first night, they glommed onto the synthesizer before taking their coats and cape off.
"How early can we play the synthesizer?" they-asked in preparation for next morning. Soon we were hearing "Merrily, We Roll' Along," with a different one of the synthesizer's 18 "instruments" on every "roll along." Our 10-year-old was playing "Swinging Shepherd Blues" on "flute" and shifting to her actual flute for a simple duet with the synthesizer "flute." Our ninth grader at ll:30 one night, toothbrush in hand, was found synthesizing with the other.
When the boys' rock band gathered, the synthesizer added a new voice, sometimes that of a conventional instrument, sometimes its own wild combi- nation of wow, growl, vibrato, brilliance, pitch blend, 'repeat," and portamento. Unlike the typical organ note, a note on this synthesizer can be altered in many ways by controls activated by pressing harder on the keys.
Its insides work like those in a giant synthesizer. That is, electronic tone waves are produced by oscillators, then filtered to achieve various timbres, and further altered to get percussive and other "attack." A sawtooth wave is related to brass instrument sound, a square wave to woodwinds.
Synthesizer complexities are "packaged" for the amateur in the Soloist. Instead of putting together a trombone sound, for example, from all the variables on a bigger synthesizer panel, he simply flips the "trombone" switch. The same for instruments from tuba to piccolo. It's a case of convenience weighed against all-but-limitless flexibility.
But for me the apotheosis of our home synthesizer came during Powell's concert at Boston University. Surrounded by big synthesizes and enormous speakers, he would get a stentorian mass of sound going, hammering rhythms and resounding echoes, and then he'd turn to the little Soloist-and, riding on top of everything, would come an incredible, soaring wail, the pro's exciting version of what we've all been fooling around with when the synthesizer age arrived at our house.