From punch-card labs to MIDI, the synth remade popular sound
A synthesizer generates audio electronically—via subtractive, additive, FM, and related methods—rather than vibrating strings or air columns. Mid-century lab machines such as the RCA Mark II used punch cards and racks of tubes; by the 1970s portable keyboards and patch memory carried new timbres from studios onto stages and into nearly every genre.
Earlier electric instruments—the Telharmonium, Trautonium, ondes Martenot, theremin—prepared the ground as electricity spread. In 1957 Harry Olson and Herbert Belar finished the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer at Princeton laboratories, reading punched paper tape. Authors of Analog Days date the synthesizer's early years from Robert Moog's 1964 modular instrument through the mid-1970s; Don Buchla's contemporaneous Modular Electronic Music System favored touchplates over a standard keyboard. Moog's cheaper Minimoog of 1970 became the first synth sold in music stores and a live-performance staple, though still monophonic.
Retail sales from 1971 spurred firms such as ARP in the United States and EMS in Britain. Tom Oberheim pushed early commercial polyphony; Sequential Circuits' 1978 Prophet-5 used microprocessors so players could store patches. MIDI arrived in 1982 as a sync standard that still endures. Yamaha's 1983 DX7, built on Stanford engineer John Chowning's FM research, became the first commercially successful digital synth, while Korg's 1988 M1 workstation mixed sampled transients and loops into complete tracks without a traditional studio.
Wendy Carlos's bestselling Switched-On Bach (1968) proved commercial appetite after psychedelic scenes had treated synths as avant-garde curiosities. Rock acts from the Doors and the Beatles to Keith Emerson adopted Moogs; Emerson pioneered major rock Moog performance. Software instruments playable in real time via MIDI, including ReBirth and Reality, appeared by 1997, and modular culture revived in the late 1990s even as vintage analogs fetched premium prices—leaving the synthesizer, Analog Days argues, an innovation comparable to the electric guitar.
Source: Synthesizer
