Laurie Spiegel Playing 1977 Bell Labs Hal Alles Synth

Concerto for Self-Accompanying Digital Synthesizer. The instrument is possibly the first realtime digital synthesizer, built at Bell Telephone Labs, NJ by Hal Alles and team, with C language software written by Laurie that processes the player's live input into an ongoing accompaniment that will continue to be played live against.
This is a legal copy uploaded by the owner of the original tape. The OHM DVD's video was taken from this.
For more info on see retiary.org/ls/...
For tech info on the synth see:
www.matrixsynth...

[@MusicMouse]

I'm told this video is "a victim of a re-encoding error". The audio is missing and the video is messed up too. Patience. They are supposedly looking for a backup. Much thanks for all the great comments! They do help keep me going. - Laurie

[@presidentevil9951]

Hey Laurie What was the first band to use this synthesizer? Could you please let me know? Thanks

[@MusicMouse]

@@presidentevil9951 I’m not aware of any band using it ever.

[@presidentevil9951]

@@MusicMouse my other question is what can the fairlight CMI do that this one can't?

[@MusicMouse]

@@presidentevil9951 I don’t know the Fairlight CMI well enough to give you a full comparison. You would have to research both online. But I did work with a Fairlight briefly in the early 1980s and it was, or seemed to me to be, a straight sample playback machine. In contrast, Hal Alles’s machine was a general purpose computational and signal processing system that was extremely powerful and could be programmed to do potentially an infinite number of kinds of synthesis and signal processing. For example, in this video I was doing both additive and FM synthesis at the same time.

[@MusicMouse]

Also this video dates from 1977 whereas the Fairlight didn’t come out until 1979. We believed it to be the first fully digital realtime synthesizer, in an era when computer music was non-real-time, as in the then-dominant Music V language.

[@mrmaniac3]

I have been watching several historical videos of vocal prosthesis, the vocoder, and other synthesizers, for about an hour now. The pizza order, IBM 704 singing Daisy Bell, the 1930s Voder, and now this. I love this category of history. It's beautiful.

[@listis1975]

Thanks to you what ever you did is my inspection..just an image a video a photo..give your shinning star

[@PaulAdamssongs]

Hi Laurie. Paul here in Illinlois. I hope you are doing well !!. That one album I did called THE PROPERTY OF WATER using your Music Mouse program got picked up by Sirius, XM, Music Choice, and all the satellites. Folks seem to love your Mousie paul adams

[@wurlybird9]

chilling, just great, the music alone, but WONDERFUL to have access to videos of this stuff, which was created in the days before the ubiquity of home video playback devices....

[@myleftnutts]

Only 1 built ! and in 1977 it cost $200.000. however their were 2 commercial versions of this,the "Greatest Digital Synth" of all time. they were the "GDS" and the "Synergy1 and 2".

[@aliensporebomb]

The Alles machine was amazing - whatever happened to it? I saw another video of producing various telephone network sounds. And another with Roger Powell playing it. It’s too bad this doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Way ahead of its time.

[@jessihawkins9116]

i heard it was disassembled and scrapped for parts

[@aliensporebomb]

What a waste of a historical instrument. @@jessihawkins9116

[@NotBornEveryMinute]

From time to time, I click on this, to enjoy lovely Laurie's inspirational musical composition and computer programming skills! I see that KZbin has had a glitch, and now I should click the response, which I find is a copy of the original post. Thanks, Laurie! And, I see we have been joined by a BLACK-HOLE LOAF; A LOAF OF INFINITE DENSITY! RETREAT TO YOUR PLACE UNDER THE BRIDGE, LOAF!

[@libertarianlogic]

Hi Laurie, this is insane stuff for 1977. Thinking of Paulstretching this for a musical project-with your consent of course

[@melissarainchild]

Wow! THAT synth DESERVES to be played by this artist...I love this piece!!!

[@xeroxbiopunk6208]

I deeply love it!

[@JoeySchmidt74]

Lovely piece of music, I love this kind of thing. Also, this reminds me of how I used to love sitting playing the big Roland synth they had at my college (I think it was a Juno 60, don't quote me on that though) and turning on the arpeggiator. I could sit for ages just tweaking parameters with the synth hooked up to a delay and reverb unit.

[@michaelbauers8800]

It's so great to have this older synthesis videos. It's nice to see the gear. What little there was here is what I like about experimental electronic music - very listenable

[@WVMothman]

I was a big fan of Isoa Tomita in that era, wish I had seen this at that time.

[@manuelgonzales6483]

Stunning and Brave 😳🙀

[@creatorsremose]

Excellent! Thank you for this gem!

[@JohnLRice]

Laurie, I was never really aware of you until today! (although I had heard of Music Mouse before since I was an Amiga user for many years). You are truely an amazing woman! I can't say that I can think of anyone else that has such an exceptional combination of beauty, intellegence and creativity. Thank you for sharing your work! PS - your picture "P1040392 We're not the migrating type" goes well with tthis peice of music! ;-)

[@MuzikJunky]

Oh, Laurie, how I wish you would record more! Peace.

[@mbreeson]

So great to see this. I wish it would play on both the left and right channel. It seems to only come out of the left channel unfortunately. That aside, I am in awe of the early FM synthesis. I have a great respect and admiration for your work Ms. Spiegel. Thank you for everything!

[@rildobelo884]

Very good

[@slaytalix]

Space Music 😊

[@themetamorph]

What an awesome clip-so inspirational!

[@meedily]

It also launches nuclear warheads on old Twilight Zone episodes.

[@MasterPerotinus]

So cool! Thanks for uploading this!

[@BruecknerAmbient]

While reading all those old comments from three years ago, I slightly wonder why this video is still not deleted in favour of it's "temporary" replacement - but apart from this, let me remark that it's an interesting experience in itself to watch You play while (for this time) not distracted by the music... :-)

[@pepemogt]

very inspirational!

[@ournationalspace]

Excellent! Thanks for posting this :-)

[@MusicMouse]

You didn't read the explanation below. When this clip, which worked fine, was corrupted by KZbin's software encoding error it already had about 28,000 view and lots of comments.KZbin said they'd eventually restore it from their backup so I left it up waiting for and for the many comments to stay on line, but I uploaded a fresh copy that works fine that you can under "Video Responses". Click on it if you want to hear it. And again, there is no reason to be insulting.

[@clayrab]

Have I been patient enough? :P

[@poserp]

Mad respect, for both the coding and the playing. Truly pioneering work!

[@giorgiosancristoforo3761]

Very good video, but not the first realtime digital synthesis. Giuseppe di Giugno built the 4a processor with realtime 1000 oscillators or 500 filters, in 1975

[@adric137]

great music!

[@majasolveigkjelstrupratkje9824]

Admiration!

[@Jauly]

very good! at this time, most of the lab musicians were not uninspired wannabes on a laptop messing around. she seemed exactly to know what she is doing, and you can feel it.

[@MusicMouse]

Yes - this vid does not play. Encoding error is what they told me and that they're retriving it from backup.. Please click on the re-uploaded copy posted as Video Responses (1) here. That one plays ok.

[@unknowndes1re]

love

[@LFORSK]

perfect.

[@lesingemonotone]

Fantastic stuff! Sounds a bit similar till the RMI harmonic synthesizers...

[@cmangy]

This is about as gangster as it comes. Totally hot awesome

[@seablue]

awesome! laurie spiegel is great.. :)

[@stormyskys]

bright sound :)

[@MusicMouse]

How many times do I have to post that I'm leaving this copy, corrupted by an encoding error by KZbin, online because I want to preserve the comments but to watch and to hear it YOU HAVE TO WATCH THE REUPLOADED COPY I POSTED AS A VIDEO RESPONSE? There is no reason to be yelling inssults

[@Sonictrainkid]

0:26 Windows NT 4.0 Startup

[@keguribap]

Fabtastique!

[@RedStallion2000]

Is there no way KZbin could do you a favor (especially since it's apparently their error) and move the comments from this copy to your pristine copy? You'd think in this day and age they'd be able (and willing) to do that...

[@BobWilliam]

Yeah, very similar indeed!

[@azmi9303]

Flume - never be like you intro

[@synthknobs]

Cool

[@dirtykk000]

Jonny Greenwood me trajo aquí!!! °o°

[@kamalakelly6208]

People say technology evolving so fast well, After seeing this video now I know that actually Its evolving too slow We should’ve been way ahead by now

[@donniemartin]

suuuuuuuuperb

[@lesscunning9651]

this fucking shit is awesome.

[@rmorales80]

so this thing jus plays appregios with tons of delay... that thing was like a open labs neko of the 70's... real interesting.

[@MusicMouse]

It was historic, the world's first real time digital delay, and lots of them all at once, as well as generating the signals in the first place, requiring incredible processing power for those times. It was a distributed architecture, a major breakthrough for its era. A lot of new circuit patents for Bell Labs came out of the project of building it. It doesn't "just" play arpeggios with delays either. It did whatever the software I programmed into it described including all of the timbral variation. Glad you found it interesting. It was a long time ago by now and an awful lot of work.

[@rmorales80]

Laurie Spiegel you were ahead of your time, awsome programming! I Didnt know this even existed in the 70’s, i always thought the fairlight cmi and the synclavier were the first of these types of instruments. Very interesting machine you had.

[@MusicMouse]

I think the Fairlight CMI Series 1 came out in 1979 but the project certainly started earlier. I think it was mainly a sample playback rather than a realtime audio synthesis system and it didn't have the kind of immense polyphony available that you see in this video. The Alles machine was calculating and playing all those sounds live in realtime with no stored signal data. The Synclavier was first released in 1977-78. I think it also used FM synthesis, as I did here, although from a very different hardware architecture. The instrument in this video was completely realtime interactive, unprecendently speedy due to massive parallelization (265 processors). It was truly general purpose unlike either of the other systems you named. I chose to program it with FM synthesis to make the largest amount of realtime timbral variation available from the smallest number of interactive variables, but it could also do additive synthesis, sample playback and Hal and crew even had it doing speech.

[@TwanAM]

Laurie Spiegel This video inspiring, if I were to make sounds like this where would I start?

[@NewAllianceEastMastering]

@@MusicMouse absolutely inspiring. this Instrument and work of art is by far ahead of the Quasar that CMI was designing between 73-78 before they focussed on the sampling audio idea and had their great breakthrough...

[@goatgodagain]

Laurie: Did you use this synth for the soundtrack to The Lathe of Heaven?

[@MusicMouse]

Goatgod Again, no I didn't use it in the Lathe of Heaven or for any soundtrack work.

[@alaveralucia.4557]

Jonny Greenwood brought me here

[@jiszlai]

+Vera Lucia I second that

[@howardscarr9518]

The video response feature no longer exists?

[@stephono-zipstefanotopix4024]

No LP or CD?

[@squamam]

where can i get one ?? ;-) only one built ??

[@NotTooLoud]

The one they built is at Oberlin.

[@MasterPerotinus]

reminds me of isao tomita

[@Lectrosoul]

Wopper.. Peace R.

[@BobWilliam]

I think the technology to built this stuff in 1977 was stolen from aliens.

[@maxqubit]

Great stuff. Pure music extracted from digital ... not the copy/paste/snap2grid stuff which these days floods the masses. But sure ... perhaps this is better with drugs:) (thx for sharing)

[@layersoftheonion]

the sound is MIA.

[@lemuelbecc]

Enthralling

[@fhmxlx9246]

could make another Blade Runner soundtrack from this amazing sound

[@Cosmicprog2012]

VERY SILLY BUBBLES!!!

[@therickstah]

this probably sounds better on drugs

[@brianmurphy5036]

Not supposed to be flip-flopping back and forth between the minor and major third like that.

[@mons10]

Brian Murphy get with the times. and this was in the 70s....

[@brianmurphy5036]

mons10 not sure what you mean. harmony 101. You're in the major or in the minor. Maybe you can switch now and again. But the entire harmonic movement of the work should not be flipping the third of the tonic. It's just bad harmony, bad music--in the 21st century, in the 17th century, in between, etc.

[@drangus3468]

Brian Murphy Thank God for your post, I almost accidentally enjoyed this piece before I realised it was breaking the rules of music.

[@brianmurphy5036]

Secret Squirrel happy to help, fellas

[@MusicMouse]

Brian Murphy Thanks for the lesson Brian, but re: flipping +&- thirds, maybe you haven't heard of the blues? I hope you're not saying that blues is "bad music"! ;-) I always heard that there wasn't a single rule of counterpoint that Bach didn't break someplace in his music.

[@jessihawkins9116]

what a piece of crap. I can do all that on my laptop in fruity loops 😂

[@jtouil]

what happened to the sound?