The DX7 democratized music. John Chowning on Technoculture podcast
Channel: Federica Bressan
Date: 2020-10-16

John Chowning talks about a book project that he and Jean-Claude Risset were working on when Yamaha stopped supporting the iconic DX7. And about how the DX7 democratized music by cutting the cost of a powerful workstation that a single user could operate without the aid of a team of engineers. The interview was recorded at CCRMA at Stanford University on February 25, 2020. 

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TRANSCRIPT: It was an important contribution when, for example, the DX7, the first all digital synthesizer, became available. And it connected up to a small computer, and for a couple $1000 you could have a pretty powerful little workstation. And Jean-Claude Risset, who is my close colleague all these years, we both started work in 1964, he at Bell Labs, and I here, he started work with Max Mathews - we started working on a book, "Exploring psycho-acoustics perception using the DX7." I mean, there's a lot you can do with it. And we had some really exciting examples showing various things, like missing fundamentals and how you build attacks, and how you put what the programmers and of the DX7 would call "stuff" into the sound, meaning noise at the right point... All these things that the ears tend so much to as details that are important to making a sound live. But what happened was Yamaha then had another better product and so they dropped that DX7, they didn't want to promote it, so we had no support then to write the book, because they want output that would encourage use of their newer machines. That's how they made their money, of course, so it's natural. But anyway, there's no doubt that the DX7 with a computer democratized music. Until then, we had to have many hundreds of $1000s systems to be able to do this and all of a sudden, for a little bit of money, people could do wonderful things. 

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