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Smithsonian Magazine

March or April, 1973
Synthesizers Make The Now Sound
By Philip Tripp

These strange electronic devices may signify a revolution in music. The sounds-eerie or imitative-crop up regularly on radio and T V.

Imagine a musical instrument that looks like a combination of Apollo space capsule console, Manhattan switchboard and science-fiction monolith. Imagine seated before this conglomerate of switches, patches and plugs a sensitive flesh-and-blood musician, head boxed in earphones, fingers outstretched on a small piano-like keyboard. Indicator lights blink. When finally he presses the keys, this incredible musical machine can approximate any sound covering the range of a symphony orchestra.
This is the synthesizer, newest and perhaps most formidable musical instrument ever invented. It is changing both the esthetic and economic profile of modern music. Awesome in its power, it has an almost unlimited ability to produce and/or reproduce musical sounds. A clarinet is first, last and always a clarinet. But a synthesizer can simulate a clarinet or anything else within the spectrum of sound.
What exactly is a synthesizer? Technically, it's an apparatus consisting of different electronic modules: audio-oscillators, filters and amplifiers. Its keys are simply switches, controlling the voltage to these modules. Press the keys, and pitch or volume go up or down depending on how the keyboard is patched, or hooked up, to the modules.
This electronic process overcomes the physical limitations of traditional instruments, so the synthesizer moves the musician closer to a musical freedom that great masters never dreamed possible.
To say that the synthesizer has "caught on" as an instrument would be a vast understatement. A synthesizer was used in making the soundtrack of Clockwork Orange and in the scores of Andromeda Strain and Catch 22. Because the instrument creates novel and striking sounds, it is now used in some seven out of ten TV commercials. The Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward logos are electronic. Levi Strauss & Company uses the synthesizer to promote the sale of jeans. About half of the prime-time TV show also employ muscial electronics: Outer Limits, Mission Impossible, Night Gallery, Ironside, Sesame Street and many, many more.
Sometimes the instrument is used to imitate traditional strings, horns and percussion. But it also makes those strange sounds we tend to associate with space travel-modulated static, high-pitched pings and beeps, the deep sound of emptiness-a sound that is virtually bottomless. A synthesizer was used to simulate the overpowering engine sounds which were a major factor of Grand Prix.
The machine can make rushing sounds, clangs, whirs and spirals which soar higher and higher and seem to have no end. These strange, almost unearthly tones take our imaginations beyond terrestrial bounds and into strange worlds with soaring mountain peaks and infinite red deserts. Listening to this single outrageous orchestra, we hear the sounds of the future for which we have no apt musical description.
Electronic music lessons for Johnny
While it is likely that traditional instruments will always be with us in one form or another, some may pale in significance and number. In a few years when Johnny wishes to take music lessons, he'll mostlikely ask his parent to buy hima portable Moog, Buchla or ARP sythesizer. And not only will he study scales and rhythms, but engineering and electronics, concerning himself with sine waves and alpha patterns and the extreme subtleties of component noise.
Young people are already accustomed to the sound of the synthesizer. The instruments have been used by the Beatles, the WHO, the group Emerson, Lake and Palmer and scores of other top rock groups. Young listeners are in tune with its "vibes," its unrelenting pulse crackling with electric energy. It is the "plugged-in" sound that they have come to know in rock, have felt communally at concerts. Youthful record buyers have, in fact, already helped create an unheard of marketing spectacular, a classical recording called Switched-on-Bach, which happens to be one of the largest and fastest selling classical records of all time. It was made on a synthesizer.
The phenomenon has filtered into schools, where electronic programs are now part of the musical curriculum. And we are not far from the fall afternoon when Home Town High's marching band appears on the field at half time not with tubas and snare drums, but with 50 portable synthesizers, each capable of hundreds, even thousands, of unique and traditional sounds. We may soon see musical parlors where customers punch out a series of sounds to create a "community symphony" on a battery of synthesizers. These parlor would be patterned after the million-dollar Island of Electronicus, off St. Petersburg, Florida, where young people gathered to participate in group concerts using six big Moog machines. Darmouth students are also having their minds blown by and entirely new sound sensation, the "digital symphony," where a computer is plugged into a synthesizer.
The fact is that we are in the midst of a musical revolution, and evidence of it can be counted in dollars. Consider this: Companies that build synthesizers have grown; they have developed home models for less than $1,000; the Thomas Organ Company has been licensed to build small synthesizer units which attach to their home organs. At present, there is a commercial on TV for what is called the Wurlitzer Orbit III, and organ/synthesizer combo. If we stop and listen to one we hear a melody line that sounds like and organ and a backdrop that might be inspired by one of Karlheinz Stockhausen's fanciful orchestrations for oscillators, impulse generators and five-channel tape machines. The Wurlitzer Orbit III sells for less than a good spinet piano.
Implications grow when you consider that a synthesizer can be manipulated by just about anyone. All a non-musician needs is ingenuity, imagination and a little schizophrenia. If you own Moog's small Sonic-6, here's how you'd turn yourself into an orchestra: First come up with a concept. What sort of sounds do you want? Suppose you decide on the sort of thing you hear in the Orbit III commercial-a melody line of single notes against a somewhat "spacey" background.
Now turn on the machine. With the tone oscillator on, you turn up the volume by spinning a dial and pressing a switch which makes the pitch waver up and down. Next you pass it through a filtering device where color and timbre are shaped, then through a voltage-controlled amplifier. The keyboard produces notes.
Experiment a bit. Find a basic rhythm pattern-something simple like a wavy oscillation. Record this on your hand tape recorder. Select other tones, other rhythms and record them too. The sounds and patterns are unlimited. Once they are all down on tape, you simply play them back while you provide a "live" musical line on top. Thus you have become an electronic composer and performer.
Ironically, the huge success of the synthesizer has come as something of a surprise to those who first brought it to life. None was more shocked than RCA, which first funded a study of the commercial applications back in the mi-1950's, and came up with the Mar-I Belar-Olson synthesizer. It cost several millions of dollars to produce, weighed several tons, took up as much space as 20 large refrigerators and was bedecked with miles of wiring and gadgetry. It was far too big to be handled, too expensive to be sold commercially and required an engineering wizard to play it.

 

Still, the Mar-I was a vast improvement over older techniques using oscilloscopes, clocks, doorbells, radios, wire recorders and electrocardiographs. RCA engineers used what is called "white noise"-ordinary radio band static, which is the total of all frequencies meshed together. They attempted to isolate each element within this amalgam of frequencies and shape its individual waves with filtering devices. This they succeeded in doing. But RCA concluded that its experiments with white noise had created for them a gangling white elephant. The project was discontinued, with the comment that "RCA sees no future for commercial application of synthesizers."
Synthesizer experiments date back to 1906, the same year that Lee De Forest invented the electronic tube. An inspired Thaddeus Cahill invented the Dynamophone (also called the Telharmonium)-a forerunner of the Hammond organ. It created wave forms from spinning metal discs, then shaped them through filtering mechanisms. The Dynamophone did not have the benefit of miniature tubes and required a series of huge dynamos for power. It weighed 200 tons. As Otto Luening wryly commented in his Unfinished History of Electronic Music;"impractical".
There followed a flurry of experimentation. In Italy Luigi Russolo's great "Noise Concert" featured hand-driven machines that howled and screeched. In 1916 Edgard Varese declared that new instruments were neede to enrich the vocabulary of the modern musician, and before he died in 1965 wrote a number of compositions the world what he was talking about. In 1920 the first in s series of performance-type electronic instrument was introduced by the Russian, Leon Theremin. His invention, the Thereminovox, consisted of a black box which produced a whistling sound. This sound was controlled by the performer, who stood beside the instrument's skinny antenna, waving his right had back and forth for pitch and moving his left up and down over the box to regulate volume. It sounded a little like a musical saw.
A large family of variants followed the Thereminovox. In the late Twenties two Frenchmen, Givelet and Coupleux, found a way of combining oscillators with a control system. And in the early Thirties a group of Bauhaus students converted visible hand-drawn patterns and wave forms into audible sounds. But these systems were severely limited in the range of sounds they could make of the human emotions they could convey. This limitation was largely overcome in 1935, when the Hammond electric organ made its debut. The Hammond was a logical result of the earlier experiments and came fairly close to the original goal of pioneer electronic experimenters; a single instrument capable of reproducing the sounds of a full symphony orchestra. The Hammond created many of these sounds-some exactly, others poorly.
Yet the Hammond made it clear that the goal was attainable. Inventors continued to work on the idea of building something that could make music without traditional acoustic musical instruments. Among them was the late composer Percy Grainger, who, with Burnett Cross, patented in 1944 a "free music" device employing eight audio-oscillators and synchronizing equipment. These efforts eventually led to a true musical synthesizer.
Since 1955 hundreds of ingenious uses have been made of the sythesizer by the best minds in music. No longer considered a part of the "lunatic fringe," the synthesizer captivated the imaginations of contemporary composers. Milton Babbitt, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, Halim El-Dabh and Bulent Arel-all pioneer of electronics-each made a contribution.

 

 

 

The 1960s and 70s have been called the "romantic period" of electronic music. But in many ways the current electronic phase, with modularized sythesizer as the dominant force, is an awesome reflection of the times. Composers have conscientiously avoided the imitation of acoustic sounds. The new music is very often impersonal, even frightening. And while many compositions are quite beautiful, they crackle with the speeded-up pace of the 20th century, emphasizing that this is a revolutionary instrument that may be a significant to our comprehention of music as the A-bomb was to our understanding of warfare.
At present, most synthesizers activated by piano-type keyboards can produce no more than two pre-programmed notes at a time. The performer must record each musical line at a time, then play them back after they have been layered and mixed together. The use of tape recorders is a must for most performers, but one young New Yorder, Bob Mason, has built a modified version of the standard ARP synthesizer which allows him to play at least ten notes at a time. Mason has combined the power of the synthesizer with the polyphonic capabilities of a piano. His group, "Stardrive," has been one of the most exciting on the pop scene.
Meanwhile ARP Instruments, Inc., has been producing a polyphonic synthesizer which is capable of producing up to four notes simultaneously on its larger models. A recent success is that of Peter Zinovieff who has devised a method simulating the individual human voice. And "PEP" (Pilot Electronic Project) in Connecticut developed the Electrocomp, a synthesizer for use in secondary schools. Thus the student can produce instantaneous "music" as he would a drawing.
Says David Van Koevering, vice president of Moog Music, Inc., "Kids want to explore the synthesizer. After all, making a sound on a trumpet is hard work. You tell a kid to apply the same energy to a synthesizer and he'll automatically broaden his whole musical base. Besides, the kids have always had knobs to play with, electronic gadgets to play with-record players, TV sets, and so on. They've grown up with these things, and as a result we find these kids do very well with synthesizers." Of course they must have some musical capability to start with. And Van Koevering is careful to emphasize that "the synthesizer doesn't spell doom for acoustic instruments."
What will happen to the market in a couple of years when the manufacturers come up with a relatively inexpensive, portable polyphonic instument?
"Drastic change," replies Van Koevering. "Now we're talking about the solo orchestra performer. There is no doubt he is going to upset the market and the field of music in general." Yet, he repeats, "the great pianist will always be with us."