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Comment by nineteen999 | Hacker News Reader

This reminded me a little of the story of Raymond Scott's "Electronium" machine, which was not a digital synthesizer, but a very early analog "algorithmic composition/generative music machine", back in the 60's and 70's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronium

https://www.laweekly.com/music/raymond-scotts-electronium-ne...

He worked for Motown for several years as a creative director, but it seems no music that used the Electronium was ever released by them.

Scott himself was a very interesting man, having earlier lead jazz bands and some of his earlier compositions were frequently used in cartoons of the day, the most famous of which are probably "Powerhouse" and "The Penguin".

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Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but Raymond Scott never wrote music _for_ cartoons. His early music was used in cartoons some time later because it turned out to be an excellent fit, but at the time I believe his stated intention was to 'improve jazz'.

Great music regardless. There's a cool version of War Dance for Wooden Indians with indian dancers on YouTube.

> Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but Raymond Scott never wrote music _for_ cartoons.

You're not wrong. See:

https://www.raymondscott.net/features/accidental-music-for-a...

I find his music to be clever, entertaining and well ahead of its time in many respects. His music was sometimes dismissed by jazz purists of the time as being "novelty" or "dada" jazz.

There was a documentary I saw a little while back which included a discussion of Scott's surprise when he started receiving royalty checks again the 1990's when Ren & Stimpy started to use a lot of his music as well.

> not a digital synthesizer,

All original synths were analog

Not sure your definition of "original" here. Analog synths were experimented with since the 1920's and 1930's[1] with digital synthesis arriving around the early 1970's[2].

The Electronium was late enough not to qualify as an "original" synthesizer, unless you mean it was "all original" work by Scott, which I'm not sure is completely true either. With the first working unit developed only by 1969[3] and used at Motown throughout the 70's, I thought that it was worth differentiating from the digital synthesizers which really arrived not that much later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_synthesizer

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_synthesizer

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronium

By "original synthesizers" which I agree is a very vague term I meant things before DX7.

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