Interesting. Thanks for sharing, Cynthia.

and that is exactly what has been realised. Opening a universe of opportunities. :) You should be very proud!

Interesting. The ideas of replacing or re-synthesizing an orchestra were certainly selling points presented by Olson to justify the great development costs to RCA management, even if those were not your father's motives in designing it.

My grandfather, Cyril Hoyler, gave demonstrations of the RCA synthesizer via his "road show" lectures.

@@iam_willhoyler Back when I was gathering the materials for this at the now-defunct Sarnoff Library, I recall some photographs of a small desktop synthesizer demonstrator in the Hoyler file. This was just an oscillator with a tiny keyboard attached to it, built into a cute piano-shaped case and used for the road show demonstrations. I would assume he also had the recordings of the "real" synthesizer to play for audiences.

Electronic Synthesis of musical Forms goes back more than a hundred years!

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/r557qtRjx5OogJc.html

Could you share what the inventors real motivations were?

What was you father's name? He may have been my father's friend in the next lab whom I mentioned above.

Herbert Belar

Alice Artzt Herbert Belar

Thanks. I don't think that was the friend in the next lab my father talked about. But i am sure he must have known your father. A lot of those guys knew each other and played practical jokes on each other a lot (from what my father said) - also did some wonderful work of course.

It was designed by Herbert Belar and Harry Olson at RCA with additional contributions by Vladimir Ussachevsky and Peter Mauzey. Olsen had about 100 patents for various microphone designs, but one of his biggest contributions was in the area of experimentation with high fidelity acoustic reproduction. He basically proved that people preferred bandwidths over 5000 Hz, but only when the quality was sufficiently high to remove clicks, pops, and other distortion.

Please find it!

OK - I will try to look harder. But does that mean you don't have a copy of that recording? Also, could you tell me the name of the guy in the next lab who made that recording and gave it to my father? Thanks.

It's up on my youtube channel here: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/r557qtRjx5OogJc.html The title of the track as far as I knew was Obelin. Interesting that it had another title as well!

Many many thanks for posting this piece. I posted this on your KZfaq channel about this piece: My father Maurice Artzt worked at RCA in a lab right next to where this was being programmed. He brought home a little record with a plain white cover given to him by his friend who had been working on programming this music (whose name I cannot now remember, but who wasn't Harry Olson or Herbert Belar). This was probably several years before 1958. The record had only one side, and my father told me it was called the Frog Pond Calypso. As a child, I LOVED that piece - and hearing a short clip of it on the film about the RCA synthesizer made me try to figure out where my copy of it might be. So far I haven't been able to find that little record, and can't remember if it had any writing on it. So I don't know if anything written on that record gave that title. I'll keep looking. My father also told of a practical joke he played on his friend, who at one point was programming some Beethoven - I think he said the 5th Symphony - into the synthesizer. After hearing the same notes over and over for weeks, my father sneaked into the lab behind all the huge towers of equipment and then, in a deep loud voice, said: "I am Beethoven. What are you doing to my beautiful music?" If anyone knows the name of the friend in that lab, do let me know.

Herbert Belar. I have the recordings and am donating them to the Hagley Museum.

The narrator is my friend Martin Raboteau

Thanks for the info. I'm familiar with the very unique and groundbreaking ANS, which worked on the principle of spectral synthesis. (In fact I programmed a simple emulation of ANS in college.) Eduard Artemyev and others did some fantastic work with it. Rather than to create new sounds, Olson's group at RCA were specifically trying to build a machine that could produce popular or classical Western music i.e. 12 tones, equal temperament. Think of it from the perspective of RCA as a major entertainment tech company and it makes sense. Also, the people involved with its design were not academic musicians but corporate engineers with some music knowledge, which is a very different mind set. I had not heard of the Subharchord, will have to read up on it.

Thanks for responding, giving more insight and sharing. I love finding out new leads and unique contexts for early electronic music history. The DDR Subharchord was a kind of early workstation and one ended up being shipped to NRK broadcasting, Oslo, in the 60’s. There’s a recent doc about it and Biosphere has made a track using it together with a audio recording of the manual instructions. Nerdy heaven🥸

I dabble, but I wanna know the fundamentals, sytrus lover.

Moog never said he made the first Synthesizer and as important as Raymond Scott seems, he was a joke.

@@horowizard No love for Louis & Bebe Barron?

@@SleepSerenityRelaxation love deprivation

Hopefully, they would have abandoned electronic music research!

Yeah I think they would he horrified.

That's thankfully only a small part of the synthesizer's use cases.

They would have burnt it to the ground.

@@effyiew7318 LoL!!!!

Thanks for the info. I'm sorry you didn't like what was said. The opinions of the interviewees are their own. I'm quite aware of the history of all this stuff. The point the video was trying to make about the home synthesizer was this: Harry Olson's department at RCA had developed a working prototype for a desktop-sized home synthesizer, including a touch sensitive keyboard, at some point in the mid-to-late 60s, well before the small 70s era synths you mention such as the Minimoog and others. However, RCA chose to let this design fall by the wayside, leaving it to Moog and others to pioneer that market. I would like to know what factual inaccuracies you spotted in the video, however you should not expect any updates as this was a short school project from over a decade ago.

Regarding attribution - all of the pieces used here were produced either by RCA Labs staff on the Mk1 (i.e. Herbert Belar and team), popular composer Jim Timmens with help from RCA staff on the Mk1, or avant garde composer Milton Babbitt at Columbia on the Mk2

@@alanoneuser I did like Your presentation, and if You are assembling this history after the fact, You have done a magnificent job. It just does not convey the enthusiasm for electronic music among Young people & creator musicians, or the technical realities of that time period. When Dr. Alex Magoun states : @ 4:40, in this off hand dismissive way, that by the 1960's when integrated circuits were making solid state synthesizers a reality, there is no interest in subsidizing Harry Olsen,... this is just completely backward, and just sequentially wrong. Harry Olsen had already created RCA Mk I & ii in the 1950's, the fact that he had an idea for a "home synth" to (perhaps) be made by RCA that flatlined, has nothing to do with reality on the ground, at that time. Ussachevsky's efforts (due to the MK I & II by Olsen, at Columbia Princeton) created the core group (Babbitt, Luening, Mario Davidovsky, Bulent Arel, Halim Dabh, W Carlos was among Ussachevsky's students), would go on to ignite the synthesizer in music revolution. It was Wendy Carlos production of a coke advert, I think, that gave her enough money and potential interest, to lead Bob Moog into his 1st marketing triumph, Moog a la (W Carlos Switched on Bach -1968) with his modified model 55 (sorta loan-leased to her) which SHE couldn't even afford, which resulted in the Beatles, and Monkees and the Who to use Moog Synths in Pop records in 1969- 1972. Other than a few synthesizers that cost about as much as an expensive car at a few (very few) Universities, there were NO synthesizers in the 1960's! and certainly none made with integrated circuits! The 1st integrated circuits available to the general public around 1968-69 would typical have 4-16 transistor arrays for computer logic circuits and cost around $2 a piece and at that time completely unusable for building a synthesizer. The Arps, Moogs , and Buchla's, that were built "commercially"in the very late sixties were all built from discrete components and often times hand selected for matching voltage offsets & gain, in order to create a Synth that could stay roughly in tune. The only reason a few people, like me, could do any electronic music at all in the mid 1960's, was because we built all our gear from scratch ! I literally figured out how to build various oscillator types using 1, or 2 or occasionally 3 transistors, and 5 to 20 other components. There were no integrated circuits available, for tinkerers to use for synthesizers until around 1974, with the release of 709 an 741 op amps, which were pretty miserable little beggars. An "affordable" synthesizer for regular musicians, would not really be available until the late 1970's and early 1980's. And even at that late date, a typical usable synth, would be in the realm of 1,500 -2,000 $ which was still the price of a decent used car. There is no sense given here also of how difficult it was to use the 1st voltage controlled 3 waveform , monophonic synthesizers. A typical music student would be studying synthesizers for a month before they could create a "patch" for a sound that they considered to be somewhere along the lines of what they had hoped for. I give Harry Olsen A WHOLE LOT of CREDIT for having the vision to start this revolution, and so many other participants like Ussachevsky, and Carlos for helping it on its way.

@@Geopholus I would add re: Switched-On Bach - the reason synths took off with that record and not before was that previously, much synthesized music was avant-garde, often serial or 12 tone music, which was the academic fashion at the time but perhaps not the most listenable material, frankly. I believe even Ms. Carlos has said she quickly grew weary of this type of music in school. SOB succeeded as a sort of Bach's Greatest Hits precisely because it rejected the academic fashion of the time, which includes many of the pioneering names you mention

@@Geopholus most of the info in the video was obtained from some 30,000 original documents which I personally scanned at the RCA Labs Library (now defunct) under Dr. Alex Magoun who was its director at the time. There are digital copies of these scans at the Sarnoff Collection at TCNJ. The original documents may still exist at the Hagley Museum.

That "idiot commentator" was Milton Babbitt- it turns out, not an idiot and not a commentator, either. Hopefully you know who that is.

@@WhatInTheHeller I went back and listened to it again in context. He was being quoted by somebody else and her point was that people don't love electronic music like they do traditional acoustic sounds. If Babbitt is being quoted accurately here, than I'm don't understand it at all. He himself spent 20 years producing significant electronic work, and electronic instruments were very mainstream and common by the cell phone era, so it's a ridiculous comment that's obviously wrong. It's possible that he's being misquoted. As for the woman quoting him, I also disagree with her point. You couldn't easily remove synthesizers from pop music or film scores at this point, and their sounds are very popularly appreciated.

You may describe the note/parameter input as being digital, but the sound generation process was analog.

Not digital, it was a sequencer, electro-mechanical elements controlling the electronics, an all electronic player piano of sorts.

What they used to refer to as an "analog computer". Certainly not digital sound generation!

I like turtles.