Organ manufacturers showed some interest in FM Synthesis, but their engineers decided it wasn’t practical. Max Mathews was impressed by Chowning’s discovery and encouraged his research, but Stanford were the ones who sniffed out the commercial possibilities. Through FM Synthesis, Chowning was able to develop a wide range of complex, rich sounds, including emulating acoustic instruments and even the human voice (an area of particular interest to Chowning). In FM Synthesis, one waveform is altered by modulating its frequency with a second waveform, resulting in a more complex sound. That was the moment when I realized that the technique was really of some consequence, because with just two oscillators I was able to produce tones that had a richness and quality about them that was attractive to the ear – sounds which by other means were quite complicated to create.” I thought about that, and I realized that I could do something similar with simple FM, just by using the intensity envelope as a modulation index. For the first few milliseconds, what energy is there is mostly around the fundamental and quickly, as the intensity grows during the next 30 or 40 milliseconds, more and more harmonics appear at a successively higher volume. One of the things that he realized in that work is that there is a definite correlation between the growth of intensity during the attack portion of a brass tone and the growth of the bandwidth of the signal. “In about 1970 I remembered some work that Jean-Claude Risset had done at Bell Labs, using a computer to analyze and resynthesize trumpet tones. This lead to Chowning’s interest in digital synthesis: Stanford at the time had no analog synthesis equipment, but it did have a large mainframe computer, and its famous Artificial Intelligence Lab was established in 1965. In 1964, he began research on the movement of sounds in space using Max Mathews’ MUSIC IV software (developed at Bell Labs, MUSIC was the first widely used program for generating sound). Read More: Magic Box: The History of the MPCĬhowning’s interest in computer music made him a recognized pioneer of electronic music, which at the time was a preoccupation of both the crazy-haired weirdos who made music and the other crazy-haired weirdos who made computers. After studying composition and theory in Paris, he attained a Master of Arts degree and the title of Doctor of Musical Arts from Stanford in 1966. John Chowning was born in 1934 in Salem, New Jersey and studied violin and percussion (both of which he would make considerable use of) after a stint in the US Navy. The keyboard that gave a romantic sheen to A-Ha and was mastered by Brian Eno was also powered by one of the most valuable (non-pharma) research patents in history.įrequency modulation synthesis, or FM Synthesis, was discovered not by an engineer but a composer. In the case of the DX7, its rich, crystalline sounds were generated using a groundbreaking method of digital synthesis covered under patent. This is unheard of in the industry, where any new sound that catches the public’s ear is almost immediately cloned. Thanks to some clever engineering and even smarter licensing deals, Yamaha practically cornered the market on “owning” this sound for nearly 20 years. When people mention a generalized “1980s sound,” they’re almost invariably talking about sounds made by this one keyboard: the Yamaha DX7. Its popularity by this point is almost a cliché: it sold more than 200,000 units, and its domination of the charts in the ’80s makes it more difficult to find Top 40 hits that didn’t include a DX7 after sorting through the hundreds that did. Yamaha’s DX7 was the first mass marketed synthesizer which was also used by professional musicians. What the guitar was to rock, the DX7 was to a whole decade of music from a dozen different genres, taking root in ’80s pop and New Wave, seeding the new genres of house and techno and undermining even the guitar in its infiltration of popular music. In the modern era of computer-generated and synthesized sound, it is unlikely there will ever again be an instrument as ubiquitous as the Yamaha DX7. Released in 1983 and still a part of music studios worldwide: the Yamaha DX7 is the very definition of a classic.
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