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.
“It made Stanford a lot of money. Me a little bit,” he said.
Like, how much?
Let’s just say that Chowning’s patent was Stanford’s most lucrative — until the one for gene splicing.
And, no, he doesn’t regret signing over the rights.
The university, he said, took most of the money and put it into an endowment, which led to the creation, and continued support, of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Chowning, who received an honorary doctorate in music from Witt in 1990, was its founding director.
Helping Toto explore “Africa”
Yamaha’s digital synthesizers took off almost immediately.
“They made a big engineering commitment,” Chowning said, “based upon a future which they predicted. And it turned out to be right.”
Of course, the price had to be right.
The first of the digital synths using Chowning’s work, Yamaha’s GS1 — most famous for the marimba sound on Toto’s “Africa” in 1983 — retailed for $17,000 in the late ’70s.
The second, the mass-produced DX7, went for $2,000.
More than 200,000 of them were sold, Chowning said.
Now compare that to the Moog company’s biggest-selling analog synth model, of which only about 15,000 were sold, he said.
“Usually,” Jeff Davis said, “what drives something is sound. Analog is beautiful, but this was beautiful, too.”
And more reliable.
“Analog devices in those days had certain instabilities,” Chowning said. “The oscillators were never quite precise. They always drifted a little.”
For Davis, his analog Minimoog always drifted flat — a problem that could be brought on by something as goofy as the temperature in the club.
“Say I’d slam my Minimoog on the first song,” Davis said. “By the seventh song, I’d go to use it and it’d be out.”
Digital remedied that, and was velocity-sensitive to boot. In other words, Chowning said, the strike force of the keys affected the perceived intensity of the sound.
“That’s a basic attribute of all natural instruments,” Chowning said. “The greater the force, the richer the spectrum.”
Art-rock legend Brian Eno once came to visit Chowning at Stanford. At the time, Eno told Chowning he owned eight DX7s, favoring its attack.
Chowning also met Toto.
But the man who once studied locally with Springfield Symphony Music Director Jackson Wiley operated in a different world than the pop singers and rock musicians of the day.
“My interests were contemporary electronic music,” Chowning said, “so I had little contact with the people who actually made use of them.”
That doesn’t mean they didn’t know him.
“You always saw his name associated with Stanford,” Davis said. “I can’t believe he went to Wittenberg music school and I didn’t catch it.”
Davis likens Chowning to Les Paul, who pioneered the electric guitar.
“Now that Bob Moog is dead,” he said, “he’s probably the most famous synth inventor in the world.”
And, do you want to know a secret?
Chowning is, first and foremost, a musician.
“I didn’t understand the math at first,” Chowning confessed. “I had to have that explained to me.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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