The Story of the RCA Synthesizer

[@cynthiabelar8916]

I have been asked what Dad’s motivation was in inventing the RCA Music Synthesizer. His thoughts are clearly expressed in his 1928 letter at the beginning of his first engineering job. This letter and all his papers have been donated to the Hagley Museum and are available for study. This, and all the at home conversations, reveal that his motivation is the marriage of science and art, the creation of new options for musicians to explore, and the capacity for a musician to continue “performing” when physical capabilities had become limited. In no way was he ever interested in replacing musicians. Rather he saw it as an expansion of opportunities for both musicians and industry.

[@Stakker]

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

[@alanoneuser]

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.

[@iam_willhoyler]

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

[@alanoneuser]

@@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.

[@iam_willhoyler]

@@alanoneuser I would assume so as well. Would love to see more photos of that.

[@sachaluc]

Great job!!! just one correction: there's a mistake, the score showed at 3:48 isn't Arnold Schoenberg... It's Klavierstuck X by Karlheinz Stockhausen...

[@brucecbennett]

the Klavierstücke score shown here is by Stockhausen, not Schönberg

[@moogboy010]

It's a shame that some of the music in this film can not be found anywhere!I have the album that describes' the RCA,but there was a "Pop" album that was released,that I have never heard,except for here! : (

[@truthbydesign5146]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/r2muqKRol5J3hsU

[@astrophonix]

It depends on how you define what a synthesizer is, although the RCA machines were the first to be called synthesizers, modern synthesizers are made to be played in real time, so I would define the RCA machines as computers configured to produce sound in non-real time. Modern synths evolved from the first commercially available synths, the Moog modular systems of the 1960's, and these owed their existence to the synthesizer developed by Harald Bode in 1959, which he prototyped and played at a talk that Moog attended in 1962 and gave him the idea to produce his own voltage controlled modular synthesizers.

[@walkinthrutheparkbymr.melo3905]

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

[@alanoneuser]

you are most welcome

[@matthewdeward1984]

great doc!

[@Guitartzt]

My father, electronics engineer Maurice Artzt, worked in the David Sarnoff RCA lab right next to the lab containing this synthesizer in the early 50s, and was good friends with Harry Oleson. There was also another guy working in that lab whose name I now cannot remember. At some point my father brought home a small private issue demo recording of the synthesizer that contained a little piece called the Frog Pond Calypso - the beginning of which is on this video starting at 2:03. I must still have that little record somewhere, but so far I didn't find it. Clearly you have a copy of it. I'd LOVE to get a copy of your copy if that is possible. Please let me know - anyone who has access to that recording.

[@jaekoff5050]

Please find it!

[@Guitartzt]

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.

[@alanoneuser]

It's up on my youtube channel here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/r2muqKRol5J3hsU The title of the track as far as I knew was Obelin. Interesting that it had another title as well!

[@Guitartzt]

Many many thanks for posting this piece. I posted this on your KZbin 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.

[@cynthiabelar8916]

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

[@cherenkov_blue]

Neat little doc! Super cool to see how complicated the first synthesizers were.

[@cynthiabelar8916]

Interesting video, and seems accurate except for the motivations of the inventors. It was not at all to replace musicians. I remember the conversations well. My father was the lead inventor on this in Olson's lab.

[@7karlheinz]

Could you share what the inventors real motivations were?

[@Guitartzt]

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

[@cynthiabelar8916]

Herbert Belar

[@cynthiabelar8916]

Alice Artzt Herbert Belar

[@Guitartzt]

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.

[@howardkleger2]

The blue leaning foam core poster is a nice humorous pop-out graphic touch for the documentary

[@szcsaba101]

Fantastic!! Today I use vstis already.

[@gustavoprey6623]

First eletronic music?

[@DandyDon1]

Is the narrator in this video Ron Lucas? He appeared in and episode of Night Court as the Ventriloquist without a dummy .

[@alanoneuser]

The narrator is my friend Martin Raboteau

[@KRAFTWERK2K6]

Moog: "We made the first Synthesizer" RCA: "No, WE did!" Raymond Scott: "Am i a Joke to you guys?"

[@horowizard]

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

[@SleepSerenityRelaxation]

@@horowizard No love for Louis & Bebe Barron?

[@runner0075]

@@SleepSerenityRelaxation love deprivation

[@Fry09294]

What are the outro tracks? I've never heard them before.

[@organfairy]

Sounds like an improvisation based on 'Mack the knife'.

[@mccarthystuart]

So what input did Olson have in the design and creation of this instrument?

[@SleepSerenityRelaxation]

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.

[@cynthiabelar8916]

Oh, and the Hagley also has the letter from Moog to RCA asking for assistance……

[@MultiPetercool]

I wonder if Raymond Scott ever saw the RCA system.

[@MrKeys57]

all those men in overalls programming this huge machine for weeks, even months... - that a kid can play today in five minutes...synthezisers have for sure evolved.

[@ginhymn]

thanks for uploading

[@erin19030]

Coloring your hair now Alex, with black shoe polish?

[@EvilSamson95]

can someone tell me the name of the last track ? I love it !

[@MirlitronOne]

Very interesting. If only Dr Magoun had been taught the use of the past tense...

[@gonefishin1406]

I like the last song

[@gonefishin1406]

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

[@walkinthrutheparkbymr.melo3905]

Wolud love to see documentation of the #KLANGUMWANDLER which really was the predecessor to recording video!

[@eddy_sonik]

👍i LoVe ! 💙⚪❤

[@richardmacleod1400]

ANS Evgeny Murzin 🧐 Coil, say no more. Punch cards vs etched symbols/artwork. Apples vs Oranges. Oh… and then there’s the Subharchord from DDR which Biosphere and Manfred have been breathing new life into, It’s all good stuff anyway🫡

[@alanoneuser]

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.

[@richardmacleod1400]

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🥸

[@jm208]

fantastico

[@udomatthiasdrums5322]

Love it!!

[@Geopholus]

I wish the pieces here were properly attributed, and the editor of this presentation had a deeper knowledge of the history,... this is pretty much of a gloss on the subject, and many of the interviewees make anachronistic, condensed, reductionist arguments that really do not tell the story, and are inaccurate. For instance: no commercial home synths in the 1960's due to integrated circuit chips. That would come in the '70's. People were home brewing electronic music gear, and Moog, Buchla, and Arp were selling stuff to Universities and some recording studios for the equivalent price of a new Chevrolet, or Cadillac at the tail end of the 1960's. I was 1st really exposed to this world, with a lecture by Vladimir Ussachevsky at University of Bridgeport (circa 1966?) when I was 14?. He had an Ampex tape recorder with a bunch of his pieces recorded on tape, and explained how You could build up sounds using for instance, using a piece of test gear like a Hewlett Packard audio test oscillator, or sounds recorded on tape, spliced, mixed, or over layered, together, by over recorded putting a piece of tape over the erase head ,.. free wheel the tape through the transport , play tape backwards or slower faster. and recording onto another machine. Perhaps this was around 1964, not exactly sure. I built my 1st amp kit at age 12,- 1964. I soon figured out how to build a code practice oscillator through info in Popular Electronics and my uncle a Navy electronic expert. Ussachevsky and collaborator Otto Luening were students of Edgar Varese who had been an early 1900's advocate of NEW MUSIC, (freeing us from the shackles of tradition) using industrial sounds and electronics (Poem Electronique). The Columbia Princeton Music Lab was using the RCA Mk I & II to make music, and W Carlos, (later of Switched on Bach Fame) was among the students studying with Ussachevsky. Ussachevsky's lecture was filled with enthusiasm and childlike wonder, at all the possibilities electronic music, and "the synthesizer" would make possible. His love of his work proved contagious. Basically this lecture ended up defining my entire future career. Just to add a tribute to Wendy Carlos, with virtually no advertising, and very little airplay,... so... all word of mouth sharing among Switched on Bach enthusiasts,.. her SOB album has gone maybe 6 times platinum, and had been for at least 40 years in the top 50 classical albums in terms of sales popularity., maybe it ranks even higher. At a certain point she seems to have tired of being associated with SOB , and wants to be known for her own original creations, but this phenom is what it is, and there are millions of YT viewers who search for Wendy Carlos: SOB, 1 & 2, Well Tempered Synth, SOBrandenbergs, Clockwork Orange, Tron etc. every week apparently. With all due respect,.. RING TONES???? the only legacy... my ass....Check my channel playlists: "Switched on Bach synth" .. or "SynthOnBach (carlos style)" for 100's of examples of people who attempt to emulate this genre as well as interviews with her.

[@alanoneuser]

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.

[@alanoneuser]

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

[@Geopholus]

@@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.

[@alanoneuser]

@@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

[@alanoneuser]

@@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.

[@geoffk777]

When I attended Columbia in the 1980's, the RCA was still at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center on West 125th street, opposite the Cotton Club. However, it was strictly of historical interest by that point. The only way to get music out of it was to punch a paper tape and then cut a vinyl record disk. There was no point in learning how to do this, when the final results could be matched or bettered by a MiniMoog and 4-track tape deck. So they would show it to visitors, but it was never really used by anyone. The idiot commentator who said that electronic music is limited to ringtones and that people don't like it, obviously has no clue. Synthesizers and computer music are a billion dollar industry, with new software and equipment coming out constantly. Electronic music is now ubiquitous, in dance music, in rock, in cinema and advertising, and as a substitute for live orchestras and musicians. Anyone with an inexpensive PC or iPad can now have an electronic studio for production and performance that would have cost tens of thousands just 25 years ago. This is a actually a Golden Age of electronic music for musicians, producers and hobbyists.

[@WhatInTheHeller]

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

[@geoffk777]

@@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.

[@RadicalCaveman]

Twelve-tone music is easier to write than to listen to.

[@KnownNever]

If they knew what Dubstep and Trap was and what it would become I wounder what they would have thought back then

[@7karlheinz]

Hopefully, they would have abandoned electronic music research!

[@BetamaxFlippy]

Yeah I think they would he horrified.

[@dominicstocker5144]

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

[@effyiew7318]

They would have burnt it to the ground.

[@MrKeys57]

@@effyiew7318 LoL!!!!

[@logonazo]

so,...the first synthesizer was digital!!! not analog ,... as many may think

[@dominicstocker5144]

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

[@richardhz-oi8px]

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

[@7karlheinz]

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

[@michaeldris8509]

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