She’s labored with Stanley Kubrick *and* “Bizarre Al” Yankovic, and helped Robert Moog within the development of his eponymous synthesizer. Wendy Automobilelos can also be one of many first excessive professionalfile transgender artists–credited as Walter Automobilelos for Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange however having transitioned to Wendy by the point of The Shining, through which just a few of her items have been used.
On this temporary clip from a 1989 BBC episode of Horizon, Automobilelos, accompanied by her two cats, explains how she makes use of analog synths to create electronic facsimiles of actual devices–on this case creating an approximation of a xylotelephone, sculpting a sine wave till it feels like a mallet on wooden.
The segment additionally reveals Automobilelos operating one of many original Moog synths, in regards to the measurement of a fridge and looking like an previous teletelephone changeboard with a keyboard connected. By plugging and unplugging a sequence of cables, she demonstrates, the sine wave is deconstructed from its original “pure” however harsh sound. Later analog synths have been additive, not subtractive, she explains. (It’s one of many few instances I’ve seen previous tech defined so properly and so fastly.)
Together with working with Bob Moog, Automobilelos studied at Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center alongsideaspect two pioneers of early electronic music: Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening, each of whom would make very challenging compositions and musique concrete.
However Wendy selected each the classical and popular path, creating the Switched on Bach sequence that featured 18th century music performed on the Moog synth and others. It might lead her to Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange’s idiosyncratic score and much more success. Aside from her rating for Disney’s Tron, now very a lot beloved by followers, Automobilelos turned to extra personal, soundscape work later. And in 2005, if yow will discover a duplicate, she put out a multiple-CD set of all her soundtrack work that Kubrick never used for The Shining and others.
The description of the entire Horizon episode has a technofear theme: “In Paris, Xavier Rodet has taught a computer to sing Mozart; in Inexperiencedwich Village, Wendy Automobilelos synthesises a classical concerto from electronic tones…In Australia, Manfred Clynes reckons he has discovered a universal human language of emotion. To show it he creates really feelings on tape. What’s left for human perkinders to contribute?”
This professionalgram was no less than a decade after the primary sampling keyboard, so the anxiety is both late or overhyped. However it additionally sounds familiar to our curlease concerns over AI (as seen in these very internet pages!). Synths never changed human instruments, nevertheless it did create extra synth players. AI gained’t change human decision making (probably), however it can certainly create extra AI professionalgrammers.
Observe: An earlier version of this submit appeared on our website in 2019.
Related Content:
Electronic Music Pioneer Wendy Carlos Demonstrates the Moog Synthesizer on the BBC (1970)
Ted Mills is a freelance author on the humanities.