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Witt grad is father of the digital synthesizer

If video killed the radio star, then Wittenberg alum John Chowning killed analog

Bill Lackey Yamaha took John Chowning's research (and patent) and unleashed the first big digital synthesizer, the DX7, in 1983.

ENLARGE PHOTO

Bill Lackey Springfield's Jeff Davis plays his vintage Yamaha DX7.

ENLARGE PHOTO

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By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer Updated 9:10 AM Friday, March 26, 2010

SPRINGFIELD — According to John Chowning’s bio on the Stanford University music department Web site, he’s been good for patents on “the simulation of moving sound sources and the synthesis of complex audio spectra by means of frequency modulation.”

Wait.

What?

You mean to say there was some sort of math involved in the making of a-ha’s “Take on Me,” Bananarama’s “Venus” and Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings”?

All three No. 1 hits used the preset bass sound of Yamaha’s DX7 synthesizer — a sound made possible using Chowning’s accidental 1967 discovery of the frequency modulation algorithm, in which the carrier and modulating frequencies are within the audio band.

Wait.

What?

That sounds way too complicated for what it was, in fact, actually used for — the “flute” and “harmonica” on Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” the tubular bells on Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” and the electric piano sound on Sade’s “Smooth Operator.”

That’s also a DX7 on “Axel F” and the themes to “Miami Vice” and “Doogie Howser.”

“Few people understood the theory,” Chowning said, “but good musicians are able to do amazing things by just using their ear.”

And now get ready for the weirdest part of the equation — Chowning, the man heralded as the father of the digital synthesizer, is a proud Wittenberg alum.

Wait.

What?

“I was in the Navy and I told my father I wanted to go to college, so he thought a small school would be good,” Chowning, now 75, explained recently. “He looked around for small schools that had good music programs and so he suggested Wittenberg.

“It turned out to be a good choice.”

The man who spent four years in Springfield on the GI Bill in the late ’50s, listening to lots of Bartok and delving into improvisation and experimental percussion, went on to make his mark on the burgeoning field of computer music as a grad student at Stanford in the early ’60s.

“There were no interpreters,” he said of computer music. “It’s more like a painter putting prime colors directly onto canvas. One could create music directly. What you got is what you meant.”

His time here and his time there all led to one big thing — John Chowning, Wittenberg University class of 1959, blinded the ’80s with science.

His discovery of FM synthesis eventually was licensed to Yamaha in Japan as a last resort after the American organ manufacturers, confused by this digital stuff, passed.

Yamaha, in turn, took the research and unleashed the first big digital synthesizer, the DX7, in 1983.

If video killed the radio star, then Chowning killed analog.

He made digital instruments possible.

“It put most of those (organ) companies out of business,” said Chowning, who retired from Stanford as a music professor in 1996. “The DX7 just wiped them out.”

Hands on science

If you had a set of functioning ears in the ’80s, you heard a DX7.

It hardly mattered what you were into.

Top 40 pop?

It was all over the radio, from John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire” to Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone.”

Or maybe you were the college type who was into new wave.

Oingo Boingo and Devo played the DX7.

They did. Everybody did.

“Everyone was surprised,” Chowning said. “Yamaha was back-ordered for three years.

“The surprise to Yamaha was that this new, digital instrument, with this technique that no one understood, with an interface of membranes instead of lots of wires and knobs and sliders — it was a very simple interface, but extremely powerful.”

Springfield keyboard player Jeff Davis played countless gigs at the old Ruby Tuesdays club with his trusty DX7, which he still has more than two decades after the fact (complete with the original instruction manual).

“I got the sense it was revolutionary,” Davis recalled. “Some of the real-world sounds were remarkable.

“The bells on this are remarkable. This has got a marimba and a woodblock. It’s unnerving these sounds weren’t sampled using real-world sounds. They’re created out of science.”

That was the crux of Chowning’s 1967 discovery — he found he could simulate natural instruments and even the human voice with a machine.

“It was an ear discovery,” Chowning said. “I was experimenting with vibrato. Almost all instruments make use of vibrato. I was experimenting with increasing the vibrato depth and rate, which one can do with a computer. I just kept pushing and pushing, increasing these rates and depths, then I realized I was no longer tracking instantaneous pitch through time, but I was hearing timbral differences, or spectral differences.

“My ears said, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.’ ”

To get the kind of rich sound he was getting, he explained, would’ve taken up to 100 analog synthesizers.

Chowning, who grew up in Delaware, signed over the rights to Stanford, “in exchange for them taking all the risk,” he said. The find then was licensed to Yamaha in 1973.

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