A synthesizer the size of an entire room from the dawn of the age of computing lives at Columbia University’s Prentice Hall. Why has it been preserved all of these years and why was it even constructed, given the great expense and the fact that it had only one function. Music Librarian Nick Patterson shares the story behind the birth of electronic music and its connections to early computing here at Columbia.
Transcript:
Material Culture
The intro music is “Brit Pop” by Scott Holmes.
Intro:
This is Material Culture.
A podcast from Columbia University Libraries.
The Columbia University Libraries are home to more than books.
We have 16 different Libraries at this University.
And there is so much cool stuff here guys.
Rare books, artworks, drawings, archives.
Objects from all over the world.
We asked our librarians and curators to share some of these objects from our collections. And we asked them:
Who made them?
Who owned them?
Why are they important?
Why should we care about this?
We learned that every object has a story.
Stories that made us think about how the world has changed, and how it hasn’t.
About how objects connect us to other places and times and the people who lived there and then.
This is a podcast about these objects and the stories that they tell.
PODCAST INTRO:
RCA Mark II Synthesizer music
Kun: Welcome to our podcast
Rodrigo: Hi, My name is Rodrigo
K: And I’m Kun. Do you hear that? Do you believe this sound is generated by a machine.
K: So that is the synthesizer and we were happy to interview Nick Patterson about it. Could you give us an overview of the sythesizer?
Nick:
R: So Nick said that machine was 30 feet long, I mean we saw the picture, it took up a whole room. Most people are familiar with the pictures of computers. IBM computers and how big they were, early in the 1950s and this looked similar to that. It was huge, big old metal case, but I don’t know, does it justify. At least computers had a lot functions to them.
K: I don’t know, I just think this was built for a single purpose. For the computers, at the beginning when the person who invented the computer just wanted to use it to crack the encryption codes. Because of the limitations of the technology, the size of the computer is much bigger than this moment. But even for that, the function is very simple. It is just used to calculate the numbers and to figure out some stuff. It’s very simple, but I thought the reason was due to the limitations of the technology.
R: What’s the motivation behind it? Why did people make it and what’s it’s purpose?
N:
R: There’s two different though processes. There’s two people that want to build it as engineers to make it happen. I’m interested to find out what exactly the engineers had in mind when they were going to build this machine and what the composers had in mind with the invention, building and application of this machine.
K: Yeah, that’s true because, for my part I’m more interested in the engineering ideas about this things. Because I’m more interested in how you build this model. How you make it happen.
R: Why would you be more interested in the engineering part?
K: I like to create new things. Especially when those things are something that I am interested in. You know I have an engineering background so these things make me excited and if you know every part about this model then that means you totally understand these things. Or you have the presence to talk about it. If you want to understand something then you need to explain it clearly. If you can do that then you can do that it means that you can understand it totally. In that sense it is important to engineering if you want to understand something you must need to know exactly the details about each part of this model. So that’ s the reasons why I am more interested in the details of this model. And I want to know what are the ideas and where do they come from when the engineer when they think about these models or when they wanted to create this model. What about you? I thought that maybe you would be interested in composing or the composers ideas.
R: Yeah, so I come from an engineering background too. So I’m kind of interested in how the machine works, but I definitely am more interested in how it was used for music and what kind of sounds it made. And what kind of, and there was a mention that…what am I trying to say here? There was a mention that this was meant to replace musicians and musicians unions. But I don’t think that was possible. It doesn’t sound like music. In the intro, the part that we listened to, it doesn’t sound like music. I mean it has a tune to it, but it doesn’t sound like instruments playing. So, I don’t think that this machine was going to be able to replace real music playing.
K: This is really hard for me to distinguish music between the synthesizer and music generated by instruments because I don’t have as much sense about that. Maybe Nick has a different answer on this part.
N:
R: Right so right there Nick confirmed that, or Nick is saying, that the synthesizer was made, maybe, even though he is not completely sure that it was made for replacing musicians unions. I don’t think that is possible with this machine. I don’t think it really plays music in the same way. I don’t think it evokes the warmth and the experience that people associate with music. I don’t think that you can go to a concert and then just have this machine, or even a recording of this machine up there playing and people would get the same reaction as if it were a live orchestra.
K: I don’t know. I’m just learning this background from some literature and it says you can contour the synthesizer precisely. That means that you can create every part acurately. And for the live performance even for the expert, if you want to perform live, accidents still happen. This is not avoidable. But with the synthesizer you can do these things in advance and you can avoid these things happening. So you don’t need to worry about that. But is this better than the live performance or not? I have no idea about that.
R: Or even at home, if somebody were to take the recordings of the synthesizer and listen to it at home. I mean it doesn’t sound anything like the actual instruments, so I don’t think they would get the same effect and I think that Nick brings this up later that this was not the most efficient way to create music. It was very difficult. (laugh)
K: I thought that this was, from the engineers point, they put much attention in how to create this model. How to make this model, but from the composers standpoint, they don’t care about how to create this model. How to compare ideas about these parts. They care about how to come to the end.
R: Yeah, I guess what I was saying, with the live performance I guess there’s more parts that you have to…I guess I was saying “Control”, but what I meant was that as a composer is that you can’t control every section. There’s always going to be things that are up to the musicians.