10.8

**Dead medium: the Mark II RCA Sound Synthesizer**

From: kadrey_AT_well.com (Richard Kadrey)

Source: Peter Esmonde and Howard Mandel on the Discovery website. (((Sadly, an attempt to verify this text now receives the all-too-common "URL Not Found On This Server," a serious structural drawback to web-based research. Still, the material is of value and seems rather better than the standard superficial coverage found in most popular books on early electronic music. == bruces)))

RCA engineers Harry Olsen and Herbert Belar began research on a "sound synthesizer" in the 1940s. Their goal: to create a machine that could churn out pop hits! The RCA engineers spent the first years of research analyzing the songs of Stephen Foster in a futile attempt to get the machine to compose new tunes. If nothing else, their early research shows just how wrongheaded scientific attempts to reproduce the creative process can be.

Older and wiser, Olsen and Belar finally demonstrated their first synthesizer in 1956; like a player piano, it used punch-coded paper tape to generate a series of familiar sounds. A much-improved second machine == the Mark II RCA Sound Synthesizer == could produce virtually any waveform. Its components (which filled an entire room) were completely modular, so users could reconfigure the bulky system as they pleased. The engineers enjoyed playing renditions of everything from "The Old Folks at Home" to Bach fugues on the oversized unit, but Milton Babbitt's extraordinary synthesizer compositions showed that the Mark II could do more than crank out old favorites.

The bulky RCA contraption remained the only synthesizer in existence until the mid-1960s, when engineer Robert Moog designed and constructed a modular system of voltage-controlled oscillators, amplifiers, filters, and sequencers. The Moog synthesizer sparked a slew of arcane, psychedelic works == and changed how commercial and art music, soundtracks, and scores would sound forevermore.

By the late 1960s, the new electronic vocabulary grew tired. What first seemed like an "infinitude of possibilities" began to look like a high-tech dead end. The novelty was wearing off.

1996 Discovery Communications, Inc