Biography
Inventor and composer John Chowning earned recognition as the originator of the digital synthesizer and brought lasting change to contemporary music. His arrival came on August 22, 1934, in Salem, NJ. While pursuing studies in Paris he encountered electronic music for the first time through concerts by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. After his return to the United States he reached Stanford University in 1962, where a colleague from the orchestra gave him a copy of Max Mathews’s forward-looking article in Science. In that piece the computer-music pioneer asserted that the computer would soon become the supreme musical instrument. Although Chowning had never encountered a computer, he journeyed to Mathews’s New Jersey workplace and came back to Stanford carrying a carton of punch cards whose playback technology he located inside the university’s artificial-intelligence laboratory.
His pivotal discovery occurred in 1967. While testing rapid vibrato effects intended to lend realism to electronic tones, he began routing one sine-wave oscillator through a second. At roughly 20 Hz the resulting signal produced a complex, harmonic timbre that he could shape to resemble clarinets, bassoons, and similar instruments. Once he had identified frequency modulation synthesis, Chowning devoted several years to refining and broadening the technique. In 1971 he presented the work to Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing, which circulated the proposal among American organ builders. Hammond, Wurlitzer, and Lowry all declined; only Yamaha grasped the potential of the method.
The Japanese firm, already attempting its own digital instruments with limited results, secured a one-year exclusive license on the FM patent. It refined Chowning’s concepts and, in 1973, completed the MAD, the earliest known fully digital synthesizer. Meanwhile Chowning, whose primary roles were those of composer and instructor rather than inventor, faced criticism at Stanford for insufficient compositional output and was dismissed. While he was abroad, Yamaha negotiated a ten-year licensing agreement for the FM rights. The development left Stanford administrators in an awkward position, prompting them to reinstate Chowning first as Research Associate and later as Director of the Center for Computer Research and Musical Acoustics; a professorship followed in 1979.
Yamaha introduced the GS-1, the initial commercial realization of Chowning’s research, in 1981. Although the instrument attracted notice, it functioned chiefly as a market trial. Two years afterward the company launched the DX-7, a sixteen-voice polyphonic digital synthesizer equipped with thirty-two internal memories and a ROM/RAM cartridge slot. Demand instantly outstripped supply, allowing Yamaha to control the synthesizer market for several years. Beyond that instrument’s impact, Chowning also contributed notable computer-music compositions, among them Sabelithe in 1971, Turenas in 1972, Stria in 1977, and Phone in 1981.
His pivotal discovery occurred in 1967. While testing rapid vibrato effects intended to lend realism to electronic tones, he began routing one sine-wave oscillator through a second. At roughly 20 Hz the resulting signal produced a complex, harmonic timbre that he could shape to resemble clarinets, bassoons, and similar instruments. Once he had identified frequency modulation synthesis, Chowning devoted several years to refining and broadening the technique. In 1971 he presented the work to Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing, which circulated the proposal among American organ builders. Hammond, Wurlitzer, and Lowry all declined; only Yamaha grasped the potential of the method.
The Japanese firm, already attempting its own digital instruments with limited results, secured a one-year exclusive license on the FM patent. It refined Chowning’s concepts and, in 1973, completed the MAD, the earliest known fully digital synthesizer. Meanwhile Chowning, whose primary roles were those of composer and instructor rather than inventor, faced criticism at Stanford for insufficient compositional output and was dismissed. While he was abroad, Yamaha negotiated a ten-year licensing agreement for the FM rights. The development left Stanford administrators in an awkward position, prompting them to reinstate Chowning first as Research Associate and later as Director of the Center for Computer Research and Musical Acoustics; a professorship followed in 1979.
Yamaha introduced the GS-1, the initial commercial realization of Chowning’s research, in 1981. Although the instrument attracted notice, it functioned chiefly as a market trial. Two years afterward the company launched the DX-7, a sixteen-voice polyphonic digital synthesizer equipped with thirty-two internal memories and a ROM/RAM cartridge slot. Demand instantly outstripped supply, allowing Yamaha to control the synthesizer market for several years. Beyond that instrument’s impact, Chowning also contributed notable computer-music compositions, among them Sabelithe in 1971, Turenas in 1972, Stria in 1977, and Phone in 1981.
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