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Early Computers and Electronic Music?

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ignis-fatuus

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I've been listing to a lot of early electronic/ambient music over the past couple of years out of a growing interest in the history of how emergent technologies challenged musicians and their listeners alike. One of the projects I've found myself enjoying is Larry Fast's, Synergy. I was reading the liner notes of one of his albums the other day and saw that he listed an Apple II as as part of his musical equipment pieces. It got me thinking, I've been researching big names in synthesizer design like Robert Moog, etc., but I don't really have a bead on how early consumer microcomputers changed the musical landscape--especially for electronic music. If anyone has anything they'ed like to share I'd be interested to learn more. accompanying musical suggestions is also super welcome.
 
There were a lot of articles in Byte in the 70s and they were actually compiled into a book titled "The Byte book of Computer Music".
There are also earlier examples but I cannot name any offhand.
 
This was quite early - Peter Zinovieff used a couple of PDP 8's in his garden shed back in the mid to late 60s. Also famous for setting up EMS aka the VCS-3 as used by Pink Floyd etc. He sadly passed away a few years ago, but was active until 2017 with a number of compositions and performances. He had some involvement with the Sinclair QL as well IIRC.

bobbyowsinskiblog.com

The First Computer Music Was Created In A Garden Shed - Bobby Owsinski's Music Production Blog

The first computer music was developed in a garden shed in Putney, England in 1966. This BBC video shows it then and now.
bobbyowsinskiblog.com bobbyowsinskiblog.com
 
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ignis-fatuus said:
I've been listing to a lot of early electronic/ambient music over the past couple of years out of a growing interest in the history of how emergent technologies challenged musicians and their listeners alike. One of the projects I've found myself enjoying is Larry Fast's, Synergy. I was reading the liner notes of one of his albums the other day and saw that he listed an Apple II as as part of his musical equipment pieces. It got me thinking, I've been researching big names in synthesizer design like Robert Moog, etc., but I don't really have a bead on how early consumer microcomputers changed the musical landscape--especially for electronic music. If anyone has anything they'ed like to share I'd be interested to learn more. accompanying musical suggestions is also super welcome.
Click to expand...
You may find this book interesting from a technical standpoint, I had my own copy scanned to preserve it

archive.org

A Guide To Computer Music, Apple 2, GS, Macintosh, Amiga, IBM/Compatibles : Doland Kozek : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Guide to Computer Music: An Electronic Music Resource Paperback – September 1, 1992by Donald Kozek (Author)
archive.org

Also, this article may be neat reading for you, especially with Atari and Amiga which had a heavy influence on the electronic scene.

musictech.com

The history of trackers

Few music-sequencing softwares have a history as distinctive as the tracker. With the epochal program now arriving in hardware form, we trace the tracker’s lineage, from its humble 8-bit beginnings to its era-defining rave sounds.
musictech.com musictech.com

I'm a seasoned DJ who uses MIDI gear all the way back to Apple II; these are the first texts that come to mind.
 
Oh wow, thank you guys! I essentially cross-posted this in another forum dedicated to ambient/electronic music and so far, crickets. I will definitively be giving the source material you've helped provide a read.
 
Slightly less vintage, but it's also worth looking into the Demoscene. There was (and still is) a group of people who try to make audio/visual demonstrations using computers. Back in the 90's, the art they made was better than commercial video games. They still create new productions on old systems to this day (zx spectrum, amiga, etc) and have strange competitions, like size coding. Here's an entire generative landscape & audio synthesizer in a 4 kilobyte executable, for example

Trackers were also very prominent in the 90's (some artists still use them), but somewhere around the late 90's - early 2000's, it became possible to do realtime synthesis on modern processors. Today, a lot of 'virtual' synthesizers sound just as good as their real world analogue counterparts.
 
Demoscene stuff is great. I have a bunch of tunes from zxart.ee on my RC2014 (The YM2149 Card can play Protracker tunes).

I also still use trackers. I have a dedicated hardware tracker (newer piece of hardware) from Polyend, and I also like Renoise, a modern DAW modeled after / using tracker workflow.

Another thing I like to touch on is how synths like MT-32, and more specifically MIDI itself, allowed games to ship with the soundtracks taking a tiny portion of disk space in the grand scheme of things. If you search youtube you will find endless examples of MIDI vs Sound Blaster and so on. Here's Thexder on my Mac Plus with a Roland MT-32 synthesizer:

 
alan6502 said:
Another stretch. I have an IMS 8000 S100 computer (Industrial Micro Systems?) They were used in the late 1970's as part of the Crumar GDS synthesizer. Quite a fascinating beast. It's mentioned here: https://m.soundcloud.com/hideaway-studio/sets/1979-crumar-general

There also a detailed restoration blog here: https://forum.vintagesynth.com/viewtopic.php?t=77037

..although i cant tell if the cloudflair error is due to my vintage Microsoft phone or if there forum server is down?
Click to expand...
Tried on another phone and vintage synth forum is fine - but the blog has all it's picture nuked because of some cheap picture hosting site they used.
Some pics from a Google images search: https://images.app.goo.gl/JdJehoZgReHrvEXv7

You can see the IMS 8000 under the terminal in the middle background of the main image
 
The Apple IIe was used to program the Kurzweil 150FS and a Kaypro II for the Synergy II+. Both used Fourier Additive Synthesis techniques. Pretty obscure new and more so now.
 
ignis-fatuus said:
I've been listing to a lot of early electronic/ambient music over the past couple of years out of a growing interest in the history of how emergent technologies challenged musicians and their listeners alike. One of the projects I've found myself enjoying is Larry Fast's, Synergy.
Click to expand...

He was closely associated with PAiA in Oklahoma City

Larry Fast: Synth pioneer w/ Peter Gabriel, etc.

Tape Op is a free magazine exclusively about recording music. Subscribe (yep, for free) at tapeop.com.
tapeop.com tapeop.com
 
A hugely successful and influential pioneer from Hamburg, W. Germany (my original home town!) was / is (!) Wolfgang Palm - with the PPG Wave and Wavecomputer, he literally invented digital wavetable synthesis. All the programming was done in Motorola 6800 assembly, without C compiler!



His contributions to synthesizer development cannot be overrated.

Later, the PPG Wave turned into the Waldorf Microwave. Wavetable synthesis is still a popular synthesis method in contemporary synthesizers (no, this is not simply PCM Sample Playback).
 
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From your post I'm guessing you're mainly interested in the later stuff regarding computer generation of music, from the 1970s onward, but you might also find interesting some of the earlier work in the '50s and '60s. Max Matthews is a good place to start; his MUSIC-N software developed at Bell Labs in 1957 is the first program (that I'm aware of) that did direct digital synthesis.

Also, if you're interested in the general idea of using a computer itself as a programmed instrument (as opposed to using computers to sort-of-emulate existing western instruments by adding piano keyboards, using western scales and ideas of "notes" and "chords," and so on), Elements of Computer Music by F. Richard Moore, and its accompanying cmusic program, is amazing.
 
appleIImidi said:
The Apple IIe was used to program the Kurzweil 150FS and a Kaypro II for the Synergy II+. Both used Fourier Additive Synthesis techniques. Pretty obscure new and more so now.
Click to expand...
The Synergy actually provided a combination of additive + FM, but they didn't call attention to the fact as Yamaha had the patent on it ;D All in discrete TTL, too - including a terribly clever trick where they used phase cancellation to achieve amplitude modulation without the use of multiplication. There's a big ol' archive out there of purt'-near everything Synergy-related, with the original service manual which includes a full theory-of-operation breakdown; it's marvelous. Really need to get mine fixed up one of these days...

But yes, in terms of early computer-music research, people were doing synthesis in software back when Bob Moog was still selling Theremin kits by mail-order. It seems a little surprising that computer control of analog synthesizers didn't become more of a thing until way later (when Dave Smith made his mark with the Prophet-5 and then MIDI,) but I s'pose in an era where people were used to dropping off a stack of punched cards and coming back the next day,* nobody really expected to hear their compositions hot off the griddle.

* (Not to mention an era where musicians were as habitually broke as ever and computers were astronomically more expensive.)
 
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