Harry Mendell | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania, 1976 |
Occupation | Inventor of first digital sampling synthesizer |
Spouse | Elizabeth Olshin |
Relatives | son, Harris Mendell |
Harry Mendell is an American inventor and computer designer. In the 1970s and 1980s he worked in electronics, specifically with computers and music. He invented the first digital sampling synthesizer. The American musician Stevie Wonder bought Mendell's invention, the Computer Music Melodian and used it on a documentary soundtrack and corresponding soundtrack album inspired by the book The Secret Life of Plants . Wonder worked with Mendell for almost a decade, including almost all the tracks that are on the soundtrack album The Woman in Red , for which Mendell won a Platinum record. Mendell also worked with Bon Jovi.
In the late 1980s onwards, Mendell moved into conceptualizing and designing computer algorithms for international finance, and became an expert on global risk management, research in the financial field, as well as machine learning and natural language processing.
As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s, Mendell took a course during which he studied the Moog synthesizer, an analog synthesizer. He became curious about how a synthesizer could be adapted to computing. His university thesis was on computer vision, and he designed a solid-state imaging system, which was one of the first to be invented. Mendell graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976, and at about the same time he invented the first digital sampling synthesizer, while working at the Annenberg Center for Communication. [1]
At Bell Labs from 1976 to 1984, Mendell worked as part of a group developing the Unix system; commenting about this research in the 2013 University of Pennsylvania interview, he said, "I actually developed a chip for managing memory, and it's still the same system they use."
In 1980, on National Public Radio, Mendell was interviewed about the "Computer Music Melodian", his digital sampling synthesizer. [2] This consisted of a small computer attached to a synthesizer, an amplifier, and a tape deck; Mendell commented, "It can take any sound, and it can store that sound in its memory, and then it can sound like whatever you entered into it. So it can sound like any musical instrument, or it can take sounds which aren't from music instruments, like a bird singing, and make that into a musical instrument." When asked what the Melodian could be used for, Mendell explained that, "A good example is what Stevie Wonder did with it in "The Secret Life of Plants"; he wanted to be able to have birds singing a melody which he wrote." Mendell was referring to the 1979 soundtrack album Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants" . The Melodian plays a major role in the track "Don't Drive Drunk", which was used in a public service announcement on nationwide television.
In 1984, The New York Times featured an article about two new electronic instruments that were each a keyboard and software combination, designed to work with a home computer, the Commodore 64. One of the two instruments reviewed was Mandell's "Melodian". The review noted that the Melodian had a keyboard of nearly three and a half octaves, and could produce the sounds of 19 different musical instruments, "from the bagpipe to the violin, with calliope, flute, harpsichord, mandolin and organ, as well as various synthesizers and claviers". Also available was "RhythmMaster", a teaching tool to help a beginning musician with various aspects of performing and understanding music. The New York Times review said that RhythmMaster "is one piece of educational software that, unlike most of its kinfolk, actually delivers." [3]
In 1987, The New York Times ran a long (988 word) article describing "the merging of digital audio recording technology with satellite telecommunications". In a recording session arranged by Mendell, the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens were linked with a studio in Los Angeles in real time, so that Stevie Wonder and producer Quincy Jones were able lay down a harmonica track played in Los Angeles onto a piece of music (the theme of the television series Moonlighting ) in the New York City studio. Then in the same recording session, Nile Rodgers in Queens added guitar to Stevie Wonder's song, "Stop, Don't Pass Go" in Los Angeles. [4]
Mendell worked with Bon Jovi on the 1986 album Slippery When Wet ; on the album his name is listed in an acknowledgement.
In about 1986, Mendell moved into working in the financial sector, creating algorithms for trading options and managing risk. In 1997, Mendell co-authored (with 15 other financial experts including Peter Carr, the first author) a scholarly article called "Towards a Theory of Volatility Trading"; the abstract includes the statement, "The primary purpose of this article is to review three methods which have emerged for trading realized volatility." [5]
In approximately 1996, the website Risk.net published a news piece, "Morgan Stanley Enters 'Phase Two' Of Global Risk Strategy" which describes Mendell as "Morgan's head of global market risk technology". Mendell comments, "Understanding our risk is strategic to our business. We need to be extremely precise about risk." He explains that Morgan Stanley has developed the ability to do globally consolidated VAR calculation daily, and in phase two they would develop the ability to do those calculations in real time: "Without this type of analysis, you're really going by the seat of your pants to know what kind of exposure the firm is taking.". [6]
In July 2001, Cambridge University Press published a hardback book (686 pages) called "Handbooks in Mathematical Finance: Option Pricing, Interest Rates and Risk Management". On page 475 in a chapter by P. Carr and D. Madan, there is an acknowledgement to Mendell (and 16 others) for "useful discussions". [7]
In 2002, on the website GlobalInvestorMagazine.com an article entitled "On the Road with Apogee" asked, "What do Stevie Wonder, John Bon Jovi and hedge funds have in common?" and went on to explain that Mendell and his partner Sam Glassman had started a hedge fund, "Apogee Fund Management". [8]
In May, 2003, a scholarly paper on "Trading Autocorrelation" by Peter Carr was published. Harry Mendell (and 11 others) were thanked in the paper for "helpful comments".
Harry Mendell's son, Harris Mendell, is a musician, a singer/songwriter and guitarist in the band Sundials. [9]
Electronic music broadly is a group of music genres that employ electronic musical instruments, circuitry-based music technology and software, or general-purpose electronics in its creation. It includes both music made using electronic and electromechanical means. Pure electronic instruments depended entirely on circuitry-based sound generation, for instance using devices such as an electronic oscillator, theremin, or synthesizer. Electromechanical instruments can have mechanical parts such as strings, hammers, and electric elements including magnetic pickups, power amplifiers and loudspeakers. Such electromechanical devices include the telharmonium, Hammond organ, electric piano and electric guitar.
Digital music technology encompasses the use of digital instruments to produce, perform or record music. These instruments vary, including computers, electronic effects units, software, and digital audio equipment. Digital music technology is used in performance, playback, recording, composition, mixing, analysis and editing of music, by professions in all parts of the music industry.
Stevland Hardaway Morris, known professionally as Stevie Wonder, is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and record producer. One of the most acclaimed and influential musicians of the 20th century, he is credited as a pioneer and influence by musicians across a range of genres that include R&B, pop, soul, gospel, funk, and jazz. A virtual one-man band, Wonder's use of synthesizers and other electronic musical instruments during the 1970s reshaped the conventions of contemporary R&B. He also helped drive such genres into the album era, crafting his LPs as cohesive and consistent, in addition to socially conscious statements with complex compositions. Blind since shortly after his birth, Wonder was a child prodigy who signed with Motown's Tamla label at the age of 11, where he was given the professional name Little Stevie Wonder.
Isao Tomita, often known simply as Tomita, was a Japanese composer, regarded as one of the pioneers of electronic music and space music, and as one of the most famous producers of analog synthesizer arrangements. In addition to creating note-by-note realizations, Tomita made extensive use of the sound-design capabilities of his instrument, using synthesizers to create new sounds to accompany and enhance his electronic realizations of acoustic instruments. He also made effective use of analog music sequencers and the Mellotron, and featured futuristic science-fiction themes, while laying the foundations for synth-pop music and trance-like rhythms. Many of his albums are electronic versions and adaptations of familiar classical music pieces. He received four Grammy Award nominations for his 1974 album based on music by Claude Debussy, Snowflakes Are Dancing.
The Fairlight CMI is a digital synthesizer, music sampler, and digital audio workstation introduced in 1979 by Fairlight. It was based on a commercial licence of the Qasar M8 developed by Tony Furse of Creative Strategies in Sydney, Australia. It was one of the earliest electronic music workstations with an embedded sampler and is credited for coining the term sampling in music. It rose to prominence in the early 1980s and competed with the Synclavier from New England Digital.
Sample-based synthesis is a form of audio synthesis that can be contrasted to either subtractive synthesis or additive synthesis. The principal difference with sample-based synthesis is that the seed waveforms are sampled sounds or instruments instead of fundamental waveforms such as sine and saw waves used in other types of synthesis.
A sampler is an electronic musical instrument that records and plays back samples. Samples may comprise elements such as rhythm, melody, speech, sound effects or longer portions of music.
Talking Book is the fifteenth studio album by American singer, songwriter, and musician Stevie Wonder, released on October 27, 1972, by Tamla, a subsidiary of Motown Records. This album and Music of My Mind, released earlier the same year, are generally considered to mark the start of Wonder's "classic period". The sound of the album is sharply defined by Wonder's use of keyboards and synthesizers.
Programming is a form of music production and performance using electronic devices and computer software, such as sequencers and workstations or hardware synthesizers, sampler and sequencers, to generate sounds of musical instruments. These musical sounds are created through the use of music coding languages. There are many music coding languages of varying complexity. Music programming is also frequently used in modern pop and rock music from various regions of the world, and sometimes in jazz and contemporary classical music. It gained popularity in the 1950s and has been emerging ever since.
Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants" is an album by Stevie Wonder, originally released on the Tamla Motown label on October 30, 1979. It is the soundtrack to the documentary The Secret Life of Plants, directed by Walon Green, which was based on the book of the same name by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. It contains two singles that reached the Billboard Hot 100 charts: "Send One Your Love" and the minor hit "Outside My Window". The single "Black Orchid" reached No. 63 in the UK.
Innervisions is the sixteenth studio album by American singer, songwriter, and musician Stevie Wonder, released on August 3, 1973, by Tamla, a subsidiary of Motown Records. A landmark recording of Wonder's "classic period", the album has been regarded as completing his transition from the "Little Stevie Wonder" known for romantic ballads into a more musically mature, conscious, and grown-up artist. On the album, Wonder continued to experiment with the revolutionary T.O.N.T.O. synthesizer system developed by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, and Innervisions became hugely influential on the future sound of commercial soul and black music.
Hotter than July is the nineteenth studio album by American singer, songwriter, and musician Stevie Wonder, released on September 29, 1980, by Tamla, a subsidiary of Motown Records. Wonder primarily recorded the album in Los Angeles, California, at Wonderland Studios, which he had recently acquired. The album peaked at number three on the Billboard Top LPs & Tapes chart and was certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on February 3, 1981. It was Wonder's most successful album in the UK, where it peaked at number two on the UK Albums Chart and produced four top-10 singles. Music videos were produced for the album's first, third, and fourth singles.
Music of My Mind is the fourteenth studio album by American singer, songwriter, and musician Stevie Wonder. It was released on March 3, 1972, by Tamla Records, and was Wonder's first to be recorded under a new contract with Motown that allowed him full artistic control over his music. For the album, Wonder recruited electronic music pioneers Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff as associate producers, employing their custom TONTO synthesizer on several tracks. The album hit No. 21 in the Billboard LP charts, and critics found it representative of Wonder's artistic growth, and it is generally considered by modern critics to be the first album of Wonder's "classic period".
A talk box is an effects unit that allows musicians to modify the sound of a musical instrument by shaping the frequency content of the sound and to apply speech sounds onto the sounds of the instrument. Typically, a talk box directs sound from the instrument into the musician's mouth by means of a plastic tube adjacent to a vocal microphone. The musician controls the modification of the instrument's sound by changing the shape of the mouth, "vocalizing" the instrument's output into a microphone.
The Woman in Red: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is the second soundtrack album released by American musician Stevie Wonder on the Motown label. Also featuring Dionne Warwick, the album was released in 1984 for the film of the same name. It features Wonder's biggest hit, "I Just Called to Say I Love You", which hit number one internationally and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and also features the follow-up hit, "Love Light in Flight" and "Don't Drive Drunk", the song and the accompanying music video for which were used in the Ad Council and the US Department of Transportation's Drunk Driving Prevention public service announcement the following year.
Jungle Fever is a soundtrack album by American R&B singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Stevie Wonder, recorded for the film Jungle Fever. It was released by the Motown label on May 28, 1991.
A synthesizer is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and frequency modulation synthesis. These sounds may be altered by components such as filters, which cut or boost frequencies; envelopes, which control articulation, or how notes begin and end; and low-frequency oscillators, which modulate parameters such as pitch, volume, or filter characteristics affecting timbre. Synthesizers are typically played with keyboards or controlled by sequencers, software or other instruments, and may be synchronized to other equipment via MIDI.
The Kurzweil K250, manufactured by Kurzweil Music Systems, was an early electronic musical instrument which produced sound from sampled sounds compressed in ROM, faster than common mass storage such as a disk drive. Acoustic sounds from brass, percussion, string and woodwind instruments as well as sounds created using waveforms from oscillators were utilized. Designed for professional musicians, it was invented by Raymond Kurzweil, founder of Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc., Kurzweil Music Systems and Kurzweil Educational Systems with consultation from Stevie Wonder; Lyle Mays, an American jazz pianist; Alan R. Pearlman, founder of ARP Instruments Inc.; and Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer.
Robert Margouleff is an American record producer, recording engineer, electronic music pioneer, audio expert, and film producer.
"Living for the City" is a 1973 single by Stevie Wonder from his Innervisions album. It reached number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and number 1 on the R&B chart. Rolling Stone ranked the song number 104 on their 2004 list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time".