Wendy Carlos

1939-

Wendy Carlos was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island on November 14, 1939. She started piano lessons at six years old and as a child won a Westinghouse science fair scholarship for building a computer. Carlos graduated from Brown University in 1962, majoring in music and physics. her studies continued at Columbia University, where she studied electronic music with Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky. One of the students Carlos met at Columbia was Robert Moog, who was developing one of the first voltage controlled synthesizers. Carlos remained in touch with Moog after graduating in 1965, and when Moog's device became commercially available, Carlos purchased one of the first voltage controlled synthesizers.

A few years later, in 1969, Carlos released Switched on Bach, which made the synthesizer a nationally recognized musical instrument, and placed the idea of instrument imitation by synthesized means in the forefront of synthesizer development. The reaction to Switched on Bach was staggering and immediate. People were amazing at the sound capabilities that the Moog synthesizer could produce.

Carlos's work on Switched on Bach was followed by film scores, such as A Clockwork Orange, the first film score to use the vocoder to effect text, The Shining, and Tron. Carlos also involved herself in continuing to improve the artificial acoustic sounds. Pieces such as Sonic Seasonings, Digital Moonscapes, which used for the first time what Carlos calls the LSI Philharmonic, a digital recreation of an orchestra, and Beauty and the Beast, which attempted to imitate sounds in Balinesian, African and Indian music.

Carlos returned to the classical genre with Switched on Bach 2000 which attempted to improve upon the ideas of the original recording. Carlos lives in Greenwich Village in New York City.