Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, known professionally as Vangelis, was a Greek composer and arranger of electronic, progressive, ambient, and classical orchestral music. He was best known for his Academy Award-winning score to Chariots of Fire (1981), as well as for composing scores to the films Blade Runner (1982), Missing (1982), Antarctica (1983), The Bounty (1984), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), and Alexander (2004), and for the use of his music in the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan.
A vocoder is a category of speech coding that analyzes and synthesizes the human voice signal for audio data compression, multiplexing, voice encryption or voice transformation.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is a thirteen-part, 1980 television series written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, with Sagan as presenter. It was executive-produced by Adrian Malone, produced by David Kennard, Geoffrey Haines-Stiles, and Gregory Andorfer, and directed by the producers, David Oyster, Richard Wells, Tom Weidlinger, and others. It covers a wide range of scientific subjects, including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the universe. Owing to its bestselling companion book and soundtrack album using the title, Cosmos, the series is widely known by this title, with the subtitle omitted from home video packaging. The subtitle began to be used more frequently in the 2010s to differentiate it from the sequel series that followed.
Yellow Magic Orchestra was a Japanese electronic music band formed in Tokyo in 1978 by Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The group is considered influential and innovative in the field of popular electronic music. They were pioneers in their use of synthesizers, samplers, sequencers, drum machines, computers, and digital recording technology, and effectively anticipated the "electropop boom" of the 1980s. They are credited with playing a key role in the development of several electronic genres, including synthpop, J-pop, electro, and techno, while exploring subversive sociopolitical themes throughout their career.
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 Roland MC-8 MicroComposer by the Roland Corporation was introduced in early 1977 at a list price of US$4,795. It was one of the earliest stand-alone microprocessor-driven CV/Gate music sequencers, following EMS Sequencer 256 in 1971 and New England Digital's ABLE computer (microprocessor) in 1975. Roland called the MC-8 a "computer music composer" and it was considered revolutionary at the time, introducing features such as a keypad to enter note information and 16 kilobytes of random access memory which allowed a maximum sequence length of 5200 notes, a huge step forward from the 8-16 step sequencers at the time. It also allowed the user to allocate multiple pitch CVs to a single Gate channel, creating polyphonic parts within the overall sequence. Due to the high price, only 200 units were sold worldwide, but it represented a huge leap forward in music technology.
Heaven and Hell is a studio album by Greek electronic composer Vangelis, released in November 1975 on RCA Records. It is the first album recorded at his Nemo Studios in London that he used until 1987. It is a concept album based on duality.
Blade Runner: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is the soundtrack for Ridley Scott's 1982 science-fiction noir film Blade Runner, composed by Greek electronic musician Vangelis. It has received acclaim as an influential work in the history of electronic music and one of Vangelis's best works. It was nominated in 1983 for a BAFTA and Golden Globe for best original score. The score evokes the film's bleak futurism with an emotive synthesizer-based sound, drawing on the jazz scores of classic film noir as well as Middle Eastern texture and neo-classical elements.
The Roland Juno-106 is a synthesizer released by Roland Corporation in February 1984.
Eloy Fernando Fritsch is an electronic musician, keyboard player and main composer of Brazilian progressive rock band Apocalypse. As a solo artist he creates cosmic new-age music.
Robotic voice effects became a recurring element in popular music starting in the second half of the twentieth century. Several methods of producing variations on this effect have arisen.
Nemo Studios was a recording studio in London, planned, built and used by Greek composer Vangelis between 1975 and 1987. Numerous highlights of Vangelis' career were composed in Nemo, including soundtracks for Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire.
The Roland System-100M was a modular analog synthesizer manufactured by the Roland Corporation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was the successor of the Roland System-100, a semi-modular keyboard.
Hideki Matsutake is a Japanese composer, arranger, and computer programmer. He is known for his pioneering work in electronic music and particularly music programming, as the assistant of Isao Tomita during the early 1970s and as the "fourth member" of the band Yellow Magic Orchestra during the late 1970s to early 1980s.
Paraphony is a term which has three distinct meanings in the field of music.
The Canticle of the Sun (Sonnengesang) is a composition by Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina written in 1997 and published by Hans Sikorski, it is based on the "Canticle of the Sun" by Saint Francis of Assisi and is dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich for his seventieth birthday. Though the piece features a soloist and an ensemble, Gubaidulina does not consider it a cello concerto.
The Roland RS-202 was a polyphonic string synthesizer, introduced by Roland in 1976. It was the successor to the Roland RS-101, released in 1975.
A string synthesizer or string machine is a specialized synthesizer designed specifically to make sounds similar to that of a string orchestra. Dedicated string synthesizers occupied a specific musical instrument niche between electronic organs and general-purpose synthesizers in the 1970s and early 1980s, until advances in digital signal processing technology allowed the production of inexpensive general-purpose polyphonic synthesizers and samplers, which made the existence of a separate type of instrument unnecessary.
Don Lewis was an American vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and electronic engineer. He created an instrument called the Live Electronic Orchestra (LEO), which integrated multiple instruments under a controller system and predated the MIDI controller by ten years.
