{"id":176,"date":"2019-10-07T19:38:09","date_gmt":"2019-10-07T23:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/issue-6\/?p=176"},"modified":"2024-10-08T23:14:27","modified_gmt":"2024-10-08T23:14:27","slug":"precisely-experimental-a-progression-of-analog-synthesizers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/issue-6\/precisely-experimental-a-progression-of-analog-synthesizers\/","title":{"rendered":"Precisely Experimental: A Progression of Analog Synthesizers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When we talk about music, we have a vocabulary for how music is made. We perform<\/em>, or improvise<\/em>, or compose<\/em>, or notate<\/em>. More recently, we record, overdub, track<\/em> our sounds. In the 21st Century, more and more musicians do something a little different – they program<\/em> music. This summer I spent some time thinking about what this means, and how we could revisit the original tool by which music was programmed: the sequencer<\/em>.
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Around twenty-five years ago, long before I\u2019d heard of ITP, I started hanging out at the Electronic Music Center at Columbia University. Founded in the mid-1950s, and now renamed the Computer Music Center, this place is the oldest research facility for electronic music in the Western Hemisphere. The CMC became a pioneer in electronic research, ranging from early experiments with tape delay, basic research in audio mixing and spatialization, and the development of open source computer music languages<\/a>. In addition, because of the CMC, Columbia has one of the top programs in music composition<\/a> and sound art<\/a> in the United States. But despite its over sixty years doing innovative work, the Center is best known for a room-size relic in the form of a piece of vacuum tube-powered equipment called the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer<\/a>, nicknamed \u201cVictor\u201d. Victor, as it\u2019s been often claimed, is not the world\u2019s first synthesizer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"An<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Depending on whether electricity is key to how you define synthesizer<\/em> and how pedantic you might be, the world\u2019s first synthesizer may, in fact, be the Telharmonium<\/a>, developed in the 1890s. Alternately, whoever started naming the stops on pipe organs<\/a> after the instruments they mimicked – most likely in Byzantium in the 8th Century CE – could have been the inventor of the synthesizer.
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Similarly, Victor  wasn\u2019t the world\u2019s first sequencer – player pianos and music boxes, developed in the age of mechanical innovation that gave us cuckoo clocks and pocket watches, could reliably play repeated sequences of notes over a century before.
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In college and graduate school I was a fairly consistent presence at the CMC, where I would play it<\/a>, show it off, and sing its praises to visitors. During these demos, I\u2019d generally gloss over the fact that the system was obsolete within five years of its installation because some smart people in New Jersey had just invented the transistor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n