The Electronic Century Part IV: The Seeds of the Future

May 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Joel Chadabe

At the end of the 1960s, two distinct but parallel paths of technical innovation traversed the field of electronic music. One of the paths, leading toward a future of digital audio and digital signal processing, was computer music. It was neither musically nor technically an easy path to follow. But the difficulties of computer-music development, such as the lack of real-time feedback and the need to specify music in computer code, were offset by the promise of creating any sound imaginable—not to mention the advantages of precise control, repeatability, and nearly indestructible storage.

The other path of technical progress, followed by many musicians, led to the development of the synthesizer. Analog synths, many of which could be played like traditional instruments, opened up a new world of electronic sound in performance. With the help of hugely successful recordings like Wendy Carlos's Switched-On Bach and Keith Emerson's single "Lucky Man," synthesizers were becoming standard in virtually every band's instrumentation.

SYNTHESIZERS OF THE '70S

By the beginning of the 1970s, it was clear that electronic sounds were hot and that electronic music could become a viable industry. In fact, the market exploded during the decade, with many new companies developing new instruments, and the technology itself advanced quickly. As we moved from the transistors of the '60s to the integrated circuits of the '70s, computers and analog synthesizers became less expensive and easier to use, and they were often joined together in what were called hybrid systems.

In several experimental studios—including those at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, the Netherlands—computers were used as sophisticated sequencers to generate control voltages for analog synthesizers. Emmanuel Ghent's Phosphones (1971) and Laurie Spiegel's Appalachian Grove (1974) are examples of music created at Bell Labs; Gottfried Michael Koenig's Output (1979) exemplifies music composed at the Institute of Sonology (see the sidebar "Recommended Resources").

The most important trend of the '70s, however, was the increasing accessibility of digital technology. With the invention of digital synths, the analog and digital paths—which had wound their separate ways through the landscape of electronic music in the '60s—began to converge. These new instruments combined the performance capabilities of analog synthesizers with the precision of computers.

In 1972 Jon Appleton was director of the Bregman Studio at Dartmouth College, which housed a large Moog modular system. Appleton asked Sydney Alonso, a faculty member at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, about using a computer to control this system. Alonso's advice was to forget the Moog and build a digital synthesizer. Together they did, calling it the Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer. Cameron Jones, a student at the college, wrote the software. Alonso and Jones then formed a company called New England Digital and, with Appleton's musical advice, went on to create the Synclavier.

The Synclavier was a computer-and-digital-synthesizer system with an elegantly designed keyboard and control panel. In September 1977, I bought the first Synclavier, although mine came without the special keyboard and control panel that Alonso and Jones had so painstakingly designed (see Fig. 1). My idea was to write my own software and control the computer in various ways with a number of different devices. For example, in Follow Me Softly (1984) I used the computer keyboard to control the Synclavier in a structured improvisation with percussionist Jan Williams. In 1983, Appleton composed Brush Canyon for a Synclavier with both the keyboard and the control panel.

By the late '70s, digital synthesizers were under development at research institutions such as Bell Labs and the Paris-based organizations Groupe de Recherches Musicales and Institute for Research and Coordination of Acoustics and Music (IRCAM). The market was full of analog, hybrid, and all-digital synthesizers, drum machines, and related devices. These products were manufactured by a long list of companies, among them ARP, Crumar, E-mu Systems, Kawai, Korg, Moog Music, Oberheim Electronics, PPG, Rhodes, Roland, Sequential Circuits, Simmons, Synton, and Yamaha. Technology was advancing quickly, the level of creativity was high, a new mass market was emerging, and price was increasingly important. High-end products were quickly adapted to a larger market. When Fairlight Instruments put the first sampler on the market in 1979, it cost about $25,000; by 1981, E-mu's Emulator was selling for $10,000. It was an exciting time, with new and powerful technologies appearing at increasingly affordable prices.

THE BEGINNING OF MIDI

Although innovation, creativity, and adventure were in the air at the end of the '70s, there was also a large measure of chaos in the market. Standardization was nonexistent: if you bought a synthesizer from one manufacturer, you had to buy other products from that same company to maintain compatibility. The marketplace was fragmented, with no fragment large enough to warrant major investment. In the view of Roland president Ikutaro Kakehashi, standardization was necessary to make the industry grow. With a global market unified by a digital standard, a company of any size could develop and sell its products successfully.

In June 1981, Kakehashi proposed the idea of standardization to Tom Oberheim, founder of Oberheim Electronics. Oberheim then talked it over with Dave Smith, president of Sequential Circuits, which manufactured the extremely successful Prophet-5 synthesizer. That October, Kakehashi, Oberheim, Smith, and representatives from Yamaha, Korg, and Kawai met to discuss the idea in general terms.

In a paper presented in November 1981 at the AES show in New York, Smith proposed the idea of a digital standard. At the NAMM show in January 1982, Kakehashi, Oberheim, and Smith called a meeting that was attended by representatives from several manufacturers. The Japanese companies, along with Sequential Circuits, were the primary forces behind sustaining interest in the project, and in 1982 they defined the first technical specification of what came to be known as the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI. At the January 1983 NAMM show, a Roland JP-6 was connected to a Sequential Circuits Prophet 600 to demonstrate the new MIDI spec. After some refinement, MIDI 1.0 was released in August 1983.

The adoption of MIDI was driven primarily by commercial interests, which meant that the specification had to represent instrumental concepts familiar to the mass market. Because that market was most comfortable with keyboards, MIDI was basically a spec designed to turn sounds on and off by pressing keys. For some musicians, this was a serious limitation, but most felt that the benefits of MIDI far outweighed its shortcomings.

FROM FM TO SAMPLES

In business terms, MIDI was a smashing success. Its universal format allowed any company—new or established, large or small—to present the world with an original concept of music.

In 1983, Yamaha introduced the first monstrously successful MIDI synthesizer. The DX7 was a hit not only because of its MIDI implementation, but also because it sounded great and was reasonably priced at less than $2,000. To generate sounds, the DX7 used frequency modulation (FM), which John Chowning had developed at Stanford University in 1971 and which Yamaha had licensed in 1974.

FM results when the amplitude of one waveform, called the modulator, is used to modulate the frequency of another waveform, called the carrier. As the amplitude of the modulator increases, the spectrum of the carrier spreads out to include more partials. And as the frequency of the modulator changes, the frequencies of the partials in the carrier spectrum change. In other words, by changing the amplitude or frequency of the modulator, a performer can change the spectrum's bandwidth and the timbre of sounds. The early advantage of FM synthesis was that simple controls could cause major changes, making instruments like the DX7 very popular for live performance.

Throughout the '80s, Yamaha continued to develop new applications of FM synthesis in a line of instruments, while many other companies—Akai, Korg, and Roland among them—developed their own synthesizers. Roland, for example, released the Juno-106 in 1984 and the D-50 family in 1987. To a growing number of musicians, however, the main disadvantage of synthesized music was that it sounded electronic. As it turned out, most MIDI musicians wanted emulative sounds. They turned to samplers, which allowed any sound-whether trumpet riff or traffic noise—to be recorded and played back at the touch of a key.

In the early '80s, E-mu Systems had broken through the first major price barrier in the sampler market with its $10,000 Emulator. In 1984, Ensoniq introduced the Mirage at less than $1,300 (see Fig. 2). And in 1989, E-mu lowered the bar even further. Its Proteus, a sample-playback device that came with 256 prerecorded samples and an exceptionally simple interface, cost less than $1,000.

The electronic-music industry continued to grow throughout the 1980s. By the early '90s, the market was overflowing with synthesizers, samplers, and other MIDI hardware, but attention was beginning to center on software development.