26 Dec
2006
26 Dec
'06
4:10 p.m.
On Sun, 24 Dec 2006, William Donzelli wrote:
I am currently working on a project involving music
made with
computers before MIDI. Some aspects and examples might be the old
mainframes playing tunes on band printers, minicomputers making tunes
with RFI, microcomputers controlling analog synthesizers, and so
forth.
How about a first-class synthesizer? The New England Digital Synclavier
was built around a bit slice AM29xx minicomputer running their ABEL
operating system. IIRC, the developers were involved in early research
into digital synthesis at Dartmouth College (circa 1973?) and went on to
found NED. The Synclavier had considerable commercial software available
for it and could be programmed in a low-level language called XPL. IIRC,
the first units appeared around 1980 and almost certainly pre-dated the
IBM PC.
Although later versions "spoke" MIDI, this was a marketing afterthought.
It was light years more advanced than consumer instruments of the day,
with only the Australian FairLight synthesizer coming close.
Finding a working unit for your presentation might be difficult. They
were finicky at best and I'll wager there aren't a lot of functional
systems out there anymore. Unfortunately, the world market for $100K
synths (back when that was real money) was easily saturated and NED went
belly-up in the late 80s.
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