Three rooms in 1982
Responding to Why Stevie Wonder had to meet this inventor www.cnbc.comIn May of 1982 a branch of the Musicians’ Union in London voted to ban the synthesizer.
The same year, in Pennsylvania, Bob Yannes left the company where he had just put a three-voice synthesizer inside a home computer and co-founded Ensoniq, to build them for adults.
The same year, in Los Angeles, Stevie Wonder gave Ray Kurzweil a tour of his new studio and asked him a question. Wonder had been the first customer for Kurzweil’s reading machine in 1976, after seeing a blind man demonstrate it on the Today show. The question was whether the same computer control could be applied to the sounds of acoustic instruments. Kurzweil Music Systems was founded on the answer, with Wonder as musical advisor. A prototype was built for him in 1983 with Braille on the buttons, and the K250 went on sale the next year.
Three rooms. One voting to stop it, two building the next one. None of them knew about the others.
The essay this follows runs the same arithmetic over forty years instead of one:
The essay this follows
The Violinist and the Commodore 64
In 1982 a musicians' union voted to ban the synthesizer, and they were right about what it would cost them. The gains arrived forty years later, from a toy.
Read the essay →Becoming Gnarly, by email