Walter Carlos

Mrs. Baker was a favored teacher down the street at the Interlochen Elementary school. It was under her wing that I shook off the bad taste of an abusive 2nd grade teacher and learned to take charge of my own education, filling in the mandatory with that which really interested me. It was in her class that I ate my way through the math curriculum in four months, often waking up in the middle of the night and working ahead in my book just for the sheer joy of manipulating numbers and learning new mathematical concepts. Her husband was a venerable professor at the Arts Academy, where he taught composition and music theory. By the time I got to know him, when I was in junior high, he was on his last legs, and was famous for falling asleep during his own lectures. But there was a modular synthesizer in his studio, so I happily sat through his narcoleptic lectures with sneering students several years my senior in order to get put on the key list, so I could wander down to the basement of the cafeteria after dinner and poke around the fascinating world of electronic sound creation and manipulation.

In the mid-1960s, the synthesizer played two rather restrictive roles in music making. In popular music, its bleeps and bloops were used almost exclusively as a novelty, goosing up a track that featured more conventional instrumentation and arrangements. It was also somewhat popular in an academic environment, where its ability to create and modify pure tones offered a fascinating petri dish in which to try out different kinds of sonic experimentation. Much of the early electronic music created on synthesizers had a lot in common with its acoustic cousins in “serious” composition – i.e. academically interesting and nearly impossible to listen to. Then, in 1968, Walter Carlos released Switched-On Bach and almost single-handedly bridged the gap between the popular and the academic and brought the synthesizer out from the shadows.

The synthesizer that switched on old man Bach was one of Robert Moog’s famous early modular synthesizers, in which a whole array of sound generating oscillators and signal processors was patched together and tweaked to create new timbres of sound. Enormously expensive and monstrously complicated, you could easily spend all day patching and tweaking to get just the sound you wanted (or, far more frequently, some sound you didn’t want that was interesting nevertheless) and then have to tear it all down and start over to get a different sound. Recreating a patch meant keeping pages of complicated notes recording which module was plugged into what in which order and at what setting. Forgetting even one parameter could mean the sound you got yesterday was lost forever. Plus, these gigantic beasts (often taking up an entire studio wall) were monophonic – meaning they only produced one note at a time. One can start to imagine the difficulty of recording such an instrument and it is a tribute to Carlos’ skills as a programmer and player that he was able to get such polished performances of baroque classics out of such an unwieldy beast.

He may have been crazy, but he was no fool. The intricate interwoven lines of Bach’s celebrated fugues were particularly well-suited for electronic realization. Because much of Bach’s work relied on the complex interplay of several lines of related melodies, the monophonic restriction of early synthesizers was less a liability than it would have been trying to recreate the lush chords and sonorities of later Romantic composers, such as Beethoven. Also, the pure tonalities that the synthesizer created worked quite well in baroque music, in which precision is often more important than expression. Still, the tedious complexity of building up these layered fugues using the unwieldy and unforgiving modular Moog boggles the mind.

In one of Dr. Baker’s workshops, one of the students asked why he hadn’t purchased a polyphonic synthesizer for the studio (this was in the mid-1970s, when such things existed, although barely). He scoffed, and pointed out how all the knobs and buttons and patch bays on his synthesizer (neither a Moog nor an Arp, the other heavy hitter in those early analogue days – the brand of Dr. Baker’s particular machine escapes me) were devoted to the processing of a single signal. In order to play and control two notes, you’d get half the processing power – with each increment in polyphony resulting in a corresponding decrease in processing ability. Besides, he pointed out, you could make the synthesizer polyphonic if you really wanted to, and he proceeded to show us how.

He dialed up a sine wave, the simplest of the basic sound waves (that particular machine also had square waves, triangle waves and white noise as sound generating sources). Then, patching it through a couple of filters and carefully tweaking those filter’s parameters, he was able to isolate and amplify one of the tone’s harmonics and, with more patching and tweaking, he eventually ended up with a major chord. He recorded a few seconds of this to tape, tore the patch chords out, and slowly, painstakingly, did it again, emphasizing different harmonics and creating a different chord. That went down on tape as well. He repeated this process three more times over the next couple of hours until he had several seconds of five different chords laid to tape. Then, getting out his razorblade and calculator, he figured out how long he wanted each chord to play and at what tempo, then measured out an appropriately long stretch of tape of the corresponding chord. He then carefully taped those cut pieces together and, a mere four hours later, he had the backing chords for the first measure of Olde Lang Syne. He proudly played the resulting three seconds of cut tape and convinced all of us that, while you could make the synthesizer polyphonic, it might not be too late to switch majors and become an actor.