The professional culture of mid-twentieth century communications engineering. According to John Pierce, Richard Hamming (of Hamming window fame) used to have a "great collection of dirty limericks," which he eventually destroyed. Pierce himself made a collage with images of breasts from Playboy taking the place of teeth in a smiling mouth (from Wood's 1991 CMJ interview w Pierce) #BellLabs#SoundSynthesis#DSP
Were polyphonic filters common in the 1960s? I've discussed this with @ezra and we think the answer is no, but I wanted to ask around here too. I am aware of only one example of a customized band pass filter from c. 1966, which could be played with a keyboard, allowing for polyphony, i.e., (I think) playing the input through several separate passbands simultaneously, where the width of each passband would be (up to?) a terce or octave. #SoundSynthesis#SignalProcessing#ExperimentalMusic
On the SC forum, "dietcv" linked to Peter Worth's PhD thesis, Technology and ontology in electronic music: Mego 1994-present. Worth offers some fascinating "archaeological" details in the parts I skimmed. E.g., Pita's album <i>Seven Tons for Free<i/> was not made with a computer, but with a hardware sampler and sine waves from a test tone CD. Worth also discusses apPatch, a SuperCollider patch which Pita and others used, in some detail https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/26172/#ComputerMusic#SoundSynthesis
Paul Ceruzzi about the printer that came with the IBM 1401 computer: “It was a utilitarian device but one that users had an irrational affection for. At nearly every university computer center, someone figured out how to program the printer to play the school’s fight song by sending appropriate commands to the printer.” (@ezra, this made me think of you) #SoundSynthesis (?)