Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in ... - Aaaaarg

A RENAISSANCE OF INVENTING 141
you had to flip open a copy of the trade magazine Advertising Age, which
reported on his innovative electronic music for commercials. There was also the
latest edition of Popular Electronics, which might feature an article about Scott’s
unrelenting perfectionism as an electronics hobbyist—and a rich one at that—
making him the envy of every American male who ever dreamed of building
something from Heathkit.
Scott occasionally reached out to other engineers to obtain gear. Bob Moog
recalls a visit he and his father made to Scott’s home around 1955. Scott was
interested in using one of the younger Moog’s Theremin circuits. Bob Moog
later remarked:
I can’t remember the first time I saw that much stuff. But you don’t go
from having nothing one day to having thirty feet of equipment the next.
Scott probably was fooling with that kind of stuff for years and years. 4
What was Scott doing in his basement all that time? He was inventing electronic
music instruments and other devices that would put him at the top of the field in
the business of writing music for commercials. New York was the hotbed of
advertising production at the time, and Scott and Eric Siday—Bob Moog’s
second customer—were the two most sought-after composers of commercial
music. 5 Scott formed Manhattan Research Inc. in 1946 as an outlet for his
commercial electronic music production. By about 1960, he was offering a grab
bag of gadgets for various musical applications, including four models of
electronic doorbells, an electronic music box, and three models of an instrument
he called the Electronium. 6 By the mid-'60s, his advertising billed Manhattan
Research Inc. as “Designers and Manufacturers of Electronic Music and
Musique Concrète Devices and Systems.” 7 His most original inventions included
a variety of keyboard instruments, multi-track recording machines, and
automatic composing instruments. They included:
Multitrack tape recorder (1953). Scott invented two of the earliest multitrack
magnetic tape recorders. His patented machines could record seven and
fourteen tracks on a single reel of tape. Les Paul (b. 1915) had previously used
the technique of recording sound-on-sound in the early ’40s, but that method
only involved recording from one mono tape recorder to another while playing
along. Scott’s multitrack machines recorded seven or fourteen parallel audio
tracks on the same reel of tape. Paul made a prototype of an eight-track machine
in 1954, 8 and in 1955 Hugh Le Caine invented a machine that mixed six separate
but synchronized tapes down to one track, but nobody came close to matching
Scott’s early achievement.
Clavivox (1959). This was a form of keyboard instrument about the size of a
combo organ. It used the beat frequency principles of the Theremin but had the
unique ability to glide the notes from key to key at adjustable rates of
portamento. It also had left-hand controls for vibrato, hard attack, soft attack, and