Aug - AmericanRadioHistory.Com

music malzers
by
ROLAND GELATI
THIS BEING the Age of Automation,
it was only a matter of time until
someone got around to devising a
machine that would create music automatically
and show up the fallible
human instrumentalist for the butterfingered
duffer that he is. That machine
has now been built and the day
has dawned when we can hear music
untouched by human hands. Down at
the David Sarnoff Research Center, in
Princeton, New Jersey, the celebrated
Dr. Harry F. Olson and a group of
associated engineers have been engaged
for several years constructing
the RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer.
It was formally introduced to the
American Institute of Electrical Engineers
on January 31, and its accomplishments
can now be sampled on
RCA VICTOR LM 1922, a twelve -inch
LP entitled The Sounds and Music of
the RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer.
The record is both impressive and
rather laughable. Dr. Johnson described
this kind of endeavor for all
time when he said: "Sir, a woman
preaching is like a dog's walking on
his hind legs. It is not done well;
but you are surprised to find it done
at all." No one with an ounce of
musical discrimination could say that
these trial runs of RCA's Synthesizer
are particularly well done; but just
to hear music artificially produced by
circuits of vacuum tubes working at
the behest of a coded paper tape is
enough to give you pause. To expect
a pause that refreshes would be
asking too much. The dance band,
the piano, the hillbilly ensemble on
this record are all too palpably electronic
for genuine musical content-
ment. They sound like nothing else
than bad imitations of the real thing.
But before laughing LM 1922 off the
turntable, it might be instructive to
play a Berliner Gramophone Record
of 1895. It is always difficult to keep
a straight face when confronted with
first flights like these. Later on, the
early laughs sometimes begin to sound
just a little hollow.
Dr. Olson began his work on the
Synthesizer by analyzing musical tones
and determining their basic proper-
AUGUST 1955
ties, which he describes as frequency,
intensity, growth, duration, decay,
portamento, timbre, vibrato, and deviations.
Having isolated these properties,
his next job was to design and
have built a set of electronic circuits
that would produce them artificially
and mix them together in any way
desired. Thus far he was not break-
ing any spectacular new ground.
Electronic instruments have been created
in abundance (the electrical organ
is a common example of one), but
all - prior to Dr. Olson's - have
had to be played. RCA's Synthesizer
differs from other electronic instruments
in being independent of performers.
It produces music accord-
Keyboard of Dr. Olson's Synthesizer.
ing to the signals it receives from a prerecorded
paper tape, and - like a
phonograph - it can repeat the same
performance again and again. That
tape is analogous to musical notation;
it embodies tempo, pitch, rhythm,
quality, and phrasing. The code is
different from the one promulgated
by Guido d'Arezzo in the eleventh
century, but it is no less a system of
notation for that.
Why did Dr. Olson spend five years
of his time and $15o,000 of RCA's
money on the Synthesizer? He assured
me, when I visited him earlier this
summer in Princeton, that it was built
for strictly practical purposes. RCA
believes it to be a potentially valuable
source of musical material for records
- especially for short pop records,
where its ability to create exotic scales
and sonorities can provide some new,
off -beat enticements in a strongly
competitive market. A new and im-
proved Synthesizer is now being constructed
for the Victor Record Division
and is due to be installed in Victor's
Twenty- fourth Street Studio within
a few months. After that, great
things are expected of it. Dr. Olson
and his associates in Princeton realize
that the music synthesized so far has
been something less than awe- inspiring
in artistic impact, for the sole
creator of music on RCA's instrument
to date has been an acoustical engineer
(Herbert Belar) and not a musician.
Mr. Belar has had to content himself
with making reasonably accurate copies
of familiar music. When composers
and performers begin to work with the
Synthesizer, creating new combinations
of sounds and rhythms, the
people at RCA feel that its scope and
capabilities will become far more evident.
Since building the Synthesizer,
Messrs. Olson and Belar have been
experimenting with a device which
chops off a sliver of recorded music,
one -sixteenth of a second long, and
plays this sliver continuously so that
its tonal properties can be studied at
leisure. With this new sound analyzer,
RCA's engineers expect to find the
key to more successful operation of
the Synthesizer. They maintain that
the Synthesizer can re- create perfectly
any musical sound if only the operator
knows precisely what he wants and
how to code it properly on the paper
tape.
"It won't be long," Dr. Olson
volunteered, "before we shall be able
to achieve a perfect synthesis of
Caruso's voice as it sounds on the old
records. Once this is done, we can
surround the synthesized Caruso rendition
of an aria with a synthesized
full orchestra instead of the tinny
studio ensembles of his day. In this
way we can bring an old recording up
to date. But that isn't all. Having
c. orked out the correct code for Caruso's
voice, we can then go on to synthesize
his singing in music he never
recorded. Why, we could even put
out a synthesized record of Caruso
singing Davy Crockett." At this point
I asked for my hat and fled.
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