Circle Machines and Sequencers

Dec 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Jeff Winner and Irwin Chusid

           

WALL OF SOUND

A 20-year-old Columbia University student named Robert Moog and his father were among the privileged few who witnessed Scott's obsessions in action. At the time, the Moogs were building theremins in their basement. Scott wanted to obtain the instrument's electronic subassembly, and so he invited the Moogs to tour his facility in Manhasset, New York.

FIG. 2: Raymond Scott playing the Clavivox in the 1950s. Karloff, the instrument behind him, was a sound-effects generator that could also do simple drum-pattern sequencing.

"First, Raymond showed us his recording studio. Then a very large room with a cutting lathe and all sorts of monitoring and mixing equipment," Moog says. "The entire downstairs was a dream workshop consisting of a large room with machine tools of the highest quality; a woodworking shop; an electronics assembly room; and a large, thoroughly equipped stockroom of electronic parts. My father and I were there with our mouths hanging open."

This encounter commenced a social and professional relationship between Moog and Scott that lasted for nearly two decades. "When I first worked for Scott in the early 1950s, he had a very large laboratory," Moog says. "One room was completely filled with rack upon rack of relays, motors, steppers, and electronic circuits. Raymond would go around and adjust various things to change the sound patterns. I'd never seen anything like it. It was a huge, electromechanical `sequencer.'" Scott called it his Wall of Sound. (See Fig. 3 and the sidebar "Genesis of the Sequencer.")

Scott used the Moogs' theremin module in the first prototype of his keyboard synthesizer, the Clavivox, which he patented in 1956. (See Fig. 4). A few years before meeting the Moogs, Scott fashioned a toy theremin for his daughter Carrie. "I must have been 11 or 12, which would be around 1950 or 1951," says Carrie Makover. "I had seen a Broadway play called Mrs. McThing which used a theremin, and I loved the way it sounded. But after my dad built it, I discovered I couldn't play it. So he took it back and made it into something else."

The resulting synthesizer allowed a player to glide smoothly from one note to another without a break over a 3-octave keyboard. It could be played with an expressive portamento rather than with discrete pitches only. Subsequent improvements allowed staccato attacks, on/off vibrato toggling, and many other effects. It could also simulate many traditional instruments.

"This was not a theremin anymore," Moog says. "Raymond quickly realized there were more elegant ways of controlling an electronic circuit." In subsequent models, Scott used photocells and a steady light source beamed through photographic film graded from opaque to transparent. This varied the voltage, which changed the pitch of the tone generator. The waveform of the sound determined the tone color, and the methods of altering the waveform were similar to modern analog synths. "A lot of the sound-producing circuitry of the Clavivox resembled very closely the first analog synthesizer my company made in the mid-'60s," Moog says. "Some of the sounds are not the same, but they're close."

RACE AGAINST THE CLOCK

The discipline Scott, a relentless workaholic, imposed on his musicians came naturally to himself. In 1957, at age 50, he endured his first encounter with serious heart trouble. "I had many dead spots around my body," Scott wrote in his journal. "Cardiac specialists gave me one year to live." Instead of slowing, Scott's pace increased. Perhaps Scott realized that, besides outmaneuvering competitors, he was also pitted against the undertaker's pocket watch.

Around 1959, Scott designed and built the Circle Machine, a more compact electronic sequencer. Dr. Thomas Rhea, music synthesis professor at the Berklee College of Music, visited Scott many times in the early '70s and remembers the Circle Machine as "an analog waveform generator that was this crazy, whirling-dervish thing. It had a ring of incandescent lamps, each with its own rheostat, and a photo-electric cell on a spindle that twirled in a circle above the lights." Each bulb's intensity was individually adjustable, as was the rotation speed of the photocell. As the lights brightened, the pitch ascended. Arm rotation speed governed the rhythm. The lights could be stag-gered in brightness, and depending on the pattern, the tone sequence generated would change. The Circle Machine was capable of a wide range of unearthly sounds, as heard in numerous commercial jingles Scott recorded during the late 1950s and early 1960s (many of them are included on Manhattan Research Inc.).

FIG. 3: Raymond Scott’s Wall of Sound, which Bob Moog later described as an electromechanical sequencer. The Wall was 30 feet long and contained thousands of stepping switches. Its music needed to be played loud in order to drown out the clicking of the switches.

Building on the foundations of, and cannibalizing components from, his Karloff generator and Wall of Sound sequencer, Scott developed the first version of his "instantaneous composition/performance machine" in the late 1950s. He named it the Raymond Scott Electronium (no relation to the German Hohner electronium), and it became the most ambitious and resource-consuming project of his life (see Fig. 5). Laboring for decades, Scott developed it in many different incarnations, all of which shared his artificial intelligence technology. "The entire system is based on the concept of Artistic Collaboration Between Man and Machine," Scott wrote in a patent disclosure. "The new structures being directed into the machine are unpredictable in their details, and hence the results are a kind of duet between the composer and the machine."

Instead of a traditional, piano-style keyboard, the Electronium was "guided" by a complex series of buttons and switches, arranged in orderly rows. The system was capable of "instantaneous composition and performance" of polyphonic rhythmic structures, as well as tasking preset programs. With Scott controlling the sonorities, tempos, and timbres, he and his machine could compose, perform, and record all at once. The parts weren't multitracked; rather, voices, rhythms, and melodies originated simultaneously in real time.

"A composer `asks' the Electronium to `suggest' an idea, theme, or motive," Scott wrote in the user manual. "To repeat it, but in a higher key, he pushes the appropriate button. Whatever the composer needs: faster, slower, a new rhythm design, a hold, a pause, a second theme, variation, an extension, elongation, diminution, counterpoint, a change of phrasing, an ornament, ad infinitum. It is capable of a seemingly inexhaustible palette of musical sounds and colors, rhythms, and harmonies. Whatever the composer requests, the Electronium accepts and acts out his directions. The Electronium adds to the composer's thoughts, and a duet relationship is set up."

"It was always this kind of metaphysical, almost magical thing, about literally thinking things to the point where they would happen," says Herb Deutsch, a Hofstra University music professor who worked with Moog to develop the first Moog synthesizer in 1964. Deutsch, who also worked for Scott, remembered one of his colleague's visionary objectives. "He wanted to take the work out of being a musician," Deutsch says. "That used to really get me upset. He said, `Look, I just want to sit here, and I'd like to turn this machine on, and whenever it does something good, I just want to record it at that point.' It was not that he was a lazy guy - far from it. He worked incredibly hard to take the work out of being a composer."

Circuitry expert Alan Entenman assisted Scott. "What Ray did was to recognize that music has repetitions and patterns, and he envisioned a machine that would incorporate those patterns," Entenman says. "He thought of it as `an orchestra with a thousand voices.' It had plug-in modules, and each module was a synthesizer of his own design that was capable of making a wide variety of sounds. Each one he would give a different voice, and what he kept telling me was, that if you listen to music, it's repetition. You could repeat notes in a different tone. What made his Electronium successful was his knowledge of composition. Being a composer, he knew how to construct music from these things - and it really worked.

"This thing could make any kind of music you could imagine," Entenman says. "One time he had [what] he described as this real sexy, `raunchy jazz' coming out of this thing. He and [electronic instrument inventor/composer] Bruce Haack were just in heaven.

"I understand the secret, to some extent," Entenman says. "The harmonics are precise mathematical multiples, and when something vibrates, there are overtones. The way you blend these overtones, and the amount of offset they have with one another, gives it warmth. That's what he would do to get it to sound rich. He'd couple that with the melodious, rhythmic patterns he built into it. He would program how it was repeated, and in what key it would be repeated, so it was like gears within gears."