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RCA Mark II Synthesizer
A synthesizer the size of an entire room from the dawn of the age of computing lives at Columbia University’s Prentice Hall. Why has it been preserved all of these years and why was it even constructed, given the great expense and the fact that it had only one function. Music Librarian Nick Patterson shares the story behind the birth of electronic music and its connections to early computing here at Columbia.
Transcript:
Material Culture
The intro music is “Brit Pop” by Scott Holmes.
Intro:
This is Material Culture.
A podcast from Columbia University Libraries.
The Columbia University Libraries are home to more than books.
We have 16 different Libraries at this University.
And there is so much cool stuff here guys.
Rare books, artworks, drawings, archives.
Objects from all over the world.
We asked our librarians and curators to share some of these objects from our collections. And we asked them:
Who made them?
Who owned them?
Why are they important?
Why should we care about this?
We learned that every object has a story.
Stories that made us think about how the world has changed, and how it hasn’t.
About how objects connect us to other places and times and the people who lived there and then.
This is a podcast about these objects and the stories that they tell.
PODCAST INTRO:
RCA Mark II Synthesizer music
RCA Mark II Synthesizer
Kun:
Welcome to our podcast.
Rodrigo:
Hi, my name’s Rodrigo.
Kun:
I’m Kun. Do you hear that? Do you believe this song generated by a machine?
It’s a synthesizer, and we are very happy to invite Nick Patterson to talk about it.
Hi Nick, could you give us an overview of the synthesizer?
Nick:
The RCA Mark II Synthesizer which is currently still, although not working, housed up at Princeton upon 125th street, was installed there in Princeton in 1959, and you noticed it was Mark II, so there had been Mark I had been constructed not here by RCA labs, by the engineers: Harry Olsen and Herbert LR. The synthesizer, as you can see from this photo I brought here and probably can find others online, is a room-sized affair. It basically takes up an entire room plus some corners of a large classroom.
Rodrigo:
So Nick said that the machine was like thirty feet long, and we saw the picture that it took up a whole room like (most people are familiar with the pictures of computers) IBM computers, how big they were early in the 1950s, the synthesizer looked similar to that, it was huge bagel metal case. But I don’t know if it justifies. I mean th
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By Columbia University LibrariesA synthesizer the size of an entire room from the dawn of the age of computing lives at Columbia University’s Prentice Hall. Why has it been preserved all of these years and why was it even constructed, given the great expense and the fact that it had only one function. Music Librarian Nick Patterson shares the story behind the birth of electronic music and its connections to early computing here at Columbia.
Transcript:
Material Culture
The intro music is “Brit Pop” by Scott Holmes.
Intro:
This is Material Culture.
A podcast from Columbia University Libraries.
The Columbia University Libraries are home to more than books.
We have 16 different Libraries at this University.
And there is so much cool stuff here guys.
Rare books, artworks, drawings, archives.
Objects from all over the world.
We asked our librarians and curators to share some of these objects from our collections. And we asked them:
Who made them?
Who owned them?
Why are they important?
Why should we care about this?
We learned that every object has a story.
Stories that made us think about how the world has changed, and how it hasn’t.
About how objects connect us to other places and times and the people who lived there and then.
This is a podcast about these objects and the stories that they tell.
PODCAST INTRO:
RCA Mark II Synthesizer music
RCA Mark II Synthesizer
Kun:
Welcome to our podcast.
Rodrigo:
Hi, my name’s Rodrigo.
Kun:
I’m Kun. Do you hear that? Do you believe this song generated by a machine?
It’s a synthesizer, and we are very happy to invite Nick Patterson to talk about it.
Hi Nick, could you give us an overview of the synthesizer?
Nick:
The RCA Mark II Synthesizer which is currently still, although not working, housed up at Princeton upon 125th street, was installed there in Princeton in 1959, and you noticed it was Mark II, so there had been Mark I had been constructed not here by RCA labs, by the engineers: Harry Olsen and Herbert LR. The synthesizer, as you can see from this photo I brought here and probably can find others online, is a room-sized affair. It basically takes up an entire room plus some corners of a large classroom.
Rodrigo:
So Nick said that the machine was like thirty feet long, and we saw the picture that it took up a whole room like (most people are familiar with the pictures of computers) IBM computers, how big they were early in the 1950s, the synthesizer looked similar to that, it was huge bagel metal case. But I don’t know if it justifies. I mean th