RCA Mark II with Babbit, Mauzey, Ussachevsky

The RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer (nicknamed Victor) was the flagship piece of equipment at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Designed by Herbert Belar and Harry Olson at RCA, it was installed at Columbia University in 1957. Consisting of a room-sized array of interconnected sound synthesis components, much of the design of the machine was contributed by Vladimir Ussachevsky and Peter Mauzey. The synthesizer was funded with a large grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center The copyright status of this vintage image is undetermined; it may still be copyrighted. ... Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center The copyright status of this vintage image is undetermined; it may still be copyrighted. ... The Computer Music Center (CMC) at Columbia University is the oldest center for electronic and computer music research in the United States. ... RCA, formerly an initialism for the Radio Corporation of America, is now a trademark used by two companies for products descended from that common ancestor: Thomson SA, which manufactures consumer electronics like RCA-branded televisions, DVD players, video cassette recorders, direct broadcast satellite decoders, camcorders, audio equipment, telephones, and related... Columbia University is a private university in New York City. ... Synthesis (from the Greek words syn = plus and thesis = position) is commonly understood to be an integration of two or more pre-existing elements which results in a new creation. ... Vladimir Ussachevsky (Hailar, Manchuria, November 3, 1911 – New York, New York, January 2, 1990) was a composer particularly known for his work in electronic music. ... Peter Mauzey is an electrical engineer associated with the development of electronic music in the 1950s and 1960s at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. ... The Rockefeller Foundation is a charitable organization that operates out of New York City. ...

The RCA was the first programmable electronic music synthesizer. Earlier 20th Century electronic instruments such as the Telharmonium or the theremin were manually operated. The RCA combined diverse electronic sound generation with a music sequencer. This provided a huge attraction to composers of the day, many of whom were growing tired of creating electronic works by splicing together individual sounds recorded on sections of magnetic tape. The RCA Mark II featured a fully automated binary sequencer using a paper tape reader analagous to a player piano, that would send instructions to the synthesizer, automating playback of the machine. The synthesizer would then output sound to a synchronized shellac record lathe next to the machine. The resulting recording would then be compared against the punch-tape score, and the process would be repeated until the desired results were obtained. Electronic music is a loose term for music created using electronic equipment. ... A classic FM synthesizer, the Yamaha DX7. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999 in the... Telharmonium console by Thaddeus Cahill 1897 The earliest purely electronic musical instrument was the Telharmonium or Teleharmonium, developed by Thaddeus Cahill in 1897. ... Léon Theremin playing an early theremin The theremin or thereminvox (originally pronounced but often anglicized as [1]) is one of the earliest fully electronic musical instruments. ... The word sequencer can mean: a microsequencer in a computer CPU a music sequencer in the field of electronic music a DNA sequencer or a protein sequencer in the field of biology Sequencer (album) This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share... A composer is a person who writes music. ... Rewind redirects here. ... Look up binary in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Binary may mean: In mathematics and computer science, the binary (base-two) numeral system is a representation for numbers that uses only zeroes and ones as digits. ... A roll of punched tape Punched tape is an old-fashioned form of data storage, consisting of a long strip of paper in which holes are punched to store data. ... The player piano is a type of piano that plays music without the need for a human pianist to depress the normal keys or pedals. ... Playback could mean: Playback singing, a practice in Bollywood musicals. ... Shellac is a secretion of the lac insect Coccus lacca, found in the forests of Assam and Thailand. ... Score can mean one of several things: A score is a group of twenty things; four score means eighty. ...

The sequencer features of the RCA were of particular attraction to modernist composers of the time, especially those interested in writing dodecaphonic music with a high degree of precision. In fact, the RCA is cited by composers of the day as a contributing factor to the rise of musical complexity, insofar as it allowed composers the freedom to write music using rhythms and tempos that were impractical, if not impossible, to realize on acoustic instruments. This allure of precision as a mark of aesthetic progress (played out even today with contemporary computer-based sequencers) generated high expectations for the Mark II, and contributed to the increased awareness of electronic music as a viable new art form. Le Corbusiers Villa Savoye, 1929-30: The modern style is noted for its rigorous geometrical forms. ... In the music theory of European classical music serialism is a set of methods for composing and analyzing works of music based on structuring those works around the parameterization of parts of music: that is, ordering pitch, dynamics, instrumentation, rhythm, and on occasion other elements into a row or series... There are different senses of complexity: In information processing, complexity is a measure of the total number of properties transmitted by an object and detected by an observer. ... Rhythm (Greek ρυθμός = tempo) is the variation of the duration of sounds or other events over time. ... In musical terminology, tempo (Italian for time) is the speed or pace of a given piece. ... An instrument is a concrete or abstract tool intended for a purpose other than mechanical work, in particular a refined one. ... Aesthetics (or esthetics) (from the Greek word αισθητική) is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty. ... A computer is a device or machine for processing information according to a program — a compiled list of instructions. ...

The synthesizer had a four-note variable polyphony (in addition to twelve fixed-tone oscillators and a white noise source). The synthesizer was very difficult to set up, requiring extensive patching of analog circuitry prior to running a score. Little attempt was made to teach composition on the synthesizer, and with few exceptions the only people proficient in the machine's usage were the designers at RCA and the engineering staff at Columbia who maintained it. Princeton University composer Milton Babbitt, though not by any means the only person to use the machine, is the composer most often associated with it, and was its biggest advocate (Igor Stravinsky was rumored to have suffered a heart attack upon hearing Babbitt's glowing description of the synthesizer's capabilities). Polyphony is a musical texture consisting of several independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice (monophony) or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords (homophony). ... Oscillation is the periodic variation, typically in time, of some measure as seen, for example, in a swinging pendulum. ... This article is about white noise as a scientific concept. ... A piece of fabric. ... An analog or analogue signal is any continuously variable signal. ... For other Princetons, see Princeton. ... Milton Byron Babbitt (born May 10, 1916) is an American composer. ... Igor Fyodorovitch Stravinsky (Russian: ) (June 17, 1882 – April 6, 1971) was a Russian-American composer of modern classical music. ... A myocardial infarction occurs when an atherosclerotic plaque slowly builds up in the inner lining of a coronary artery and then suddenly ruptures, totally occluding the artery and preventing blood flow downstream. ...

A number of important pieces in the electronic music repertoire were composed and realized on the RCA. Babbit's Vision and Prayer and Philomel both feature the RCA, as does Charles Wuorinen's Pulitzer Prize-winning piece Time's Encomium. After the RCA was vandalized by thieves in the 1970s it fell into disrepair, and remains only partly functional. The last composer to get any sound out of the synthesizer was R. Luke DuBois, who used it for a thirty-second piece on the Freight Elevator Quartet's Jungle Album in 1997. This article is about the musical use of the word canon. For other uses, see canon (disambiguation). ... Charles Wuorinen (born June 9, 1938 in New York City) is an American composer. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-04-13, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... Roger Luke DuBois (born September 10, 1975 in Morristown, New Jersey) is an American composer, video artist, programmer, record producer and pedagogue based in New York City. ... The Freight Elevator Quartet are a music performance group specializing in improvised electronic music. ...

Though part of the history of electronic music, the RCA was hardly ever used. Made to United States Air Force construction specifications (and even sporting a USAF oscilloscope), its operating electronics were constructed entirely out of vacuum tubes, making the machine obsolete by its tenth birthday, having been surpassed by more reliable (and affordable) solid state modular synthesizers such as the Buchla and Moog systems. It was prohibitively expensive to replicate, and an RCA Mark III, though conceived of by Belar and Olsen, was never constructed. Nor was RCA long for the synthesizer business, prompting Columbia to purchase enough spare parts to build two duplicate synthesizers. Seal of the Air Force. ... A Tektronix model 475A portable analogue oscilloscope, a very typical instrument of the late 1970s. ... In electronics, a vacuum tube (American English) or (thermionic) valve (British English) is a device generally used to amplify, or otherwise modify, a signal. ... In physics, the solid state is one of the three phases of matter (solid, liquid, and gas). ... The Buchla Modular Synthesizer Created by engineer Don Buchla with the help of Ramon Sender and composer Morton Subotnick, it was the first portable sound synthesizing device. ... Bob Moog Dr. Robert A. Moog (born May 23, 1934) is the inventor of the Moog synthesizer. ...

Much of the historical interest of the RCA, besides its association with the Electronic Music Center, comes from a number of amusing (and possibly apochryphal) stories told regarding the synthesizer. One common story is that Ussachevsky and Otto Luening effectively conned RCA into building the machine, claiming that a synthesizer built to their specifications would "replace the symphony orchestra," prompting RCA executives to gamble the cost of the synthesizer in the hopes of being able to eliminate their (unionized) radio orchestra. The RCA is sometimes (falsely) attributed as the direct cause of the New York City Blackout of 1977, having been powered on moments before the lights went out. Otto Luening is an early pioneer of electronic music. ... A confidence trick, confidence game, or con for short (also known as a scam) is an attempt to intentionally mislead a person or persons (known as the mark) usually with the goal of financial or other gain. ... A symphony is an extended piece of music usually for orchestra and comprising several movements. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Time 1977 The New York City Blackout of 1977 was a blackout that affected New York City on July 13-14, 1977. ...

The RCA is still housed at the Columbia Computer Music Center facility on 125th Street in New York City, where it is bolted to the floor in the office of Professor Brad Garton, taking up quite a bit of precious floor space. The Computer Music Center (CMC) at Columbia University is the oldest center for electronic and computer music research in the United States. ... Midtown Manhattan, looking north from the Empire State Building, 2005 New York City (officially named the City of New York) is the most populous city in the United States, the most densely populated major city in North America, and is at the center of international finance, politics, entertainment, and culture. ... Brad Garton is an American composer and computer musician who is professor of music at Columbia University. ...

External links

• Information on the RCA