Site icon gordsellar.com

whitney music box

The very cool Shawn Scarber emailed a bunch of us something too good to miss: whitney music box takes me back to the days when I studied electronic music. We had a very early synthesizer in the Electronic Music Studio, a room that had gone unmarked for years at the University of Saskatchewan.

I swear, the synthesizer looked like something out of Star Trek — you controlled it with cables and pins stuck into various appropriate-sized sockets all over the front. I did nearly nothing with it, though some of the guys in years following mine spent hours in there figuring the old clunker out. It was a piece of history, but mostly, that branch of history looked like a dead end to me at the time, given that it was all about analogue synthesis and digital is where it is at. (Well, sort of. But anyway, don’t get me started.)

Anyway, I sometimes wonder whether they finally sold off the old machine. It was an antique, and probably worth a fortune, but the head of composition when I got to third year was deadly opposed to it. The thing was hardwired into the wall — all the cables had been installed by some fool who hadn’t color-coded anything, or left any kind of schematic around, so uninstalling it would have been easy, but reinstalling, that would have been a nightmare.

Ah, the old days of synthesis… now, totally emulated. Whee!

Exit mobile version