The Dead Media Notebook (39 page)

“Before WWII, colour was both a monopoly and a sacred mystery. Colour negatives were processed and printed behind closed doors. Natalie Kalmus, the ex-wife of Herbert Kalmus who invented the process, became Technicolor’s artistic director and constructed an officical aesthetic code for the use of colour (she preferred mutedly harmonious colour effects to discordantly jarring ones), a code as binding on a film’s colour values as was the Hays Code on its moral values. Until 1949, every film that used Technicolor was required to hire Mrs. Kalmus as ‘Technicolor Consultant.’

[The film history series “Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood” (BBC TV, 1996) shows some remarkable clips of the French Pathe Studios tinting process. It differed from earlier (vaguer) hand tinting by using an assembly line of women using stencils and pantographs. The best of these films are as precise as the hand tinted postcards of the day. It’s also mentioned that once the novelty of motion wore off, early film audiences were dissatisfied with monochromatic cinema because they had become accustomed to the rich colours of the magic lantern shows.“Cinema Europe” is a great tv series for film buffs, but also has a few interesting examples of dead media. including a German phonographic “synchronized” sound film excerpt]

Source: A Short History of the Movies, Gerald Mast, Macmillan, New York, 1992. ISBN 0-02-377070-8

From Richard Kadrey

“How could it be possible that there were farmhouses in the middle of the mountain side? There were no roads of course; sometimes not even a path. Still they have cattle, and cattle would need food. Hay. The answer was the transport wire.

“By a well-developed network of transport wires they could move anything (even the cattle itself) up and down the mountain sides without trouble. Once established, this system generated a whole culture of its own. Since the length of the wire could exceed the range of the human voice, signals would be needed. ‘Sla pa traden’ (from the Norwegian language) means literally to knock on the wire, and that is precisely what was done.

“Different ‘codes’ for every need gave a large number of signals. Though modern agriculture no longer gives room for such methods of small scale cattlery, this system is still alive in some rare places in Norway. Later in history, when the telephone spread to everywhere, the expression transferred to that new system of wires. Nowadays, ‘sla pa traden’ is a commonly used phrase in Norwegian for using the telephone.”

Source: Sla Pa Traden (Music On Transport Wires) by Atle Pakutsch Gundersen; Experimental Musical Instruments, Vol. 12, #2; December 1996; pp 22

From Mark Hayhurst

“Today, the pneumatic post survives only in Paris and Italy. Pneumatic tubes are still however widely used for the transport inside many cities of the world of small batches of telegrams, express letters and air mail letters. These tubes are generally of a diameter of about 3 inches and the messages are carried in cylinders which are propelled along the tube by an air pressure differential from the back to the front, attaining speeds of around 25 mph.

“Letters and cards which have been transported in the tubes are invariably creased where they have been rolled up for insertion in a cylinder.

“The Most Famous Pneu in History “For generations the pneumatic letter-card was known affectionately as the petit bleu since, between 1897 and 1902, it was on blue paper and it was under this name that a ‘Telegramme’ was a vital piece of evidence in the enquiries which led to the eventual acquittal of Dreyfus. At a court-martial in December 1894 he had been found guilty of passing military secrets to the Germans and was transported to Cayenne. In 1896 the contents of a waste paper basket in the office of Schwartzkoppen, the German military attache in Paris, were taken to the French Intelligence Staff and found to include a torn-up pneu which had never been sent.

“When pieced together, it was found that the petit bleu contained a message to another French officer, Esterhazy, implicating him in the offences attributed to Dreyfus. Thus started the chain of events which culminated in 1906 with the ceremonial restoration of his commission to Dreyfus in that courtyard of the Ecole Militaire lying just behind the Pavillon de l’Artillerie which had housed the telegraph office Ecole Militaire until its closure in 1891.

“The standard work in France on the pneumatic post is ‘Cent ans de tubes pneumatiques’ J Boblique, Echo de la Timbrologie, 1966.

“The engineering aspects of the service are recounted in ‘Le reseau pneumatique de Paris’ M Gaillard, Revue des PTT de France, 1, 1959.”

Source: The Pneumatic Post of Paris by J.D. Hayhurst O.B.E. Edited by C.S. Holder Prepared in digital format by Mark Hayhurst Copyright1974. The France & Colonies Philatelic Society of Great Britain.

From Richard Kadrey

“Like an object caught in the Starship Enterprise’s malfunctioning transporter, the McLeyvier shimmered between existence and Limbo for a few years beginning in 1981. Designed by composer/technologist David McLey and aggressively (not to mention prematurely) marketed by Hazelcom Industries of Canada, this high-end digital system was to be another all-in-one box performance/production wonder machine.

“’Only a few people really know the McLeyvier intimately,’ says composer Laurie Spiegel. She worked on later versions of the instrument. ‘In many ways they were absolutely wonderful, and in many other ways absolutely infuriating.’ “The McLeyvier’s functions reportedly included notational score display, editing, and printout (‘push a button and printed sheet music appears in publishable form’). A disk memory was capable of storing six hours of music material, and played it back via analog hardware with up to 128-voice polyphony.

“The computer was to accept commands ‘in any language’ including Braille. Priced between $15,000 and $30,000 depending on the options, the McLeyvier appeared at successive trade shows as the Interactive Music Processor and the Amadeus, before sinking without a trace. ‘With the indomitable spirit of David facing Goliath,’ in the words of the press release, Hazelcom proved itself not quite up to the job.

“’One of the big problems,’ Speigel states, ‘was that the company put out a computer-controlled analog system in the very year when digital synthesis was becoming the big thing.’ When McLey decided that music was more important to him than instrument manufacture, Spiegel was put in charge of redesigning the software to fit the proposed new digital hardware. Soon after, however, Hazelcom’s attention became diverted to other ventures, and the project was scrapped. According to Spiegel, ‘Only about eight of them were ever in serious use.’

“’It was a very special instrument,’ she goes on. ‘It was unbelievably reconfigurable, on the assumption that there is no best way to set up an instrument; it varies from person to person, and from piece to piece. Instead of coming up in any fixed way, the first thing it did when the program booted was to run an initialization program so that the user could customize it completely. As an integrated music environment, I don’t think there’s anything as good out there. You memorized a couple hundred commands, and you could use them at any point, so your world wasn’t chopped up into a lot of separate editors. You had random access to everything all the time. Also, it was a musical language, an operating system for music composition. The vocabulary consisted of things like ‘invert,’ ‘ostinato,’ and ‘transpose.’ It had certain limitations,’ she concludes, ‘but it could do things that nothing else today can.’”

Source: Mark Vail, Vintage Synthesizers, Miller Freeman, Inc (pp. 78-79)

From Richard Kadrey

“The ADS (Advanced Digital Synthesizer) system comprised a dual-manual splittable keyboard, a video display for envelopes, a ‘control cube’ the size of a filing cabinet for disk drives and computer hardware, and a rainbow-buttoned front panel for 64-oscillator additive synthesis and real-time sequencing that would have looked at home on the Starship Enterprise of the Star Trek of your choice. The analogy is apt, in fact, the ADS 100’s most notable public appearance was in the sound effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. No price was given when the ADS 100 was introduced, but it sure looked expensive.

“Well, to reduce a three-year tale to a few words, it was (expensive). ‘We wasted three years,’ (Tim) Ryan recalls.

“We never made a dime off the thing.’ “A midget all-in-one box version, the ADS 200, followed soon after. Its display now sported musical notation, the sequencer played back four tracks, the rear panel offered CV and gate interfaces, and the microprocessor count had jumped from three to five. Happily, the multicolored buttons remained and the filing cabinet was nowhere in sight. With the ADS 200, Con Brio’s synthesis facility finally rated a description: ‘Additive synthesis, phase modulation, frequency modulation, nested phase and frequency modulation, and combinations of all modes.’

“’It was totally configurable in software,’ Ryan says, ‘and we had 16 stage envelope generators for both frequency and amplitude, so it was kind of like the grandfather of the Yamaha DX7. On ours, you could build your own algorithms, using any of all of the 64 oscillators in any position in the algorithm. If you wanted additive, you could add 16 of them together. The phase modulation was similar to what Casio did with their CZ series. You could designate any tuning you wanted and save it. You could split the keyboard, stack sounds, model different parts of the keyboard for different parts of the sound, and save that as an entity - the kind of things that are common now.’ “Compared with the first version, Con Brio’s second model was a hit: of the three instruments manufactured, one was actually sold, for $30,000.

“By 1982, the Con Brio had dropped one of its two manual [keyboards] and, with it, a few thousand from the price tag. The ADS 200-R featured a 16-track polyphonic sequencer with 80,000 note storage capability and editing functions available from the scoring screen. The 32-voice version, expandable to 64, sold (or rather didn’t sell) for $20,500, with an additional $25,000 worth of options. Only one was ever built.

“Why did Con Brio turn up an evolutionary blind alley, while other companies have had great success with similar concepts? ‘It was a labor of love,’ Ryan says reflectively. ‘We didn’t have much sales savvy, and that was eventually our downfall. Another thing was the intimidation factor: it had something like 190 buttons on it. We figured that no musician would ever want to enter commands, so we went to the trouble of putting on all those buttons. But obviously that approach was as cryptic as a computer language would have been. It was an amazing feat technologically, but with complete disregard for the people we had to sell the thing to.”

Source: Mark Vail, Vintage Synthesizers, Miller Freeman, Inc (pp. 78-79)

From Richard Kadrey

“ARP’s founder, Alan R. Pearlman, recognized the importance of teaching musicians how to use the technology, so he designed a new instrument with a fixed selection of basic synthesizer functions. This instrument, dubbed the Model 2600, was an integrated system with the signal generating and processing functions in one box and the keyboard in another.
“Pearlman believed that schools with small or medium- sized music departments were the main market for this new instrument. To further enhance the 2600’s educational value, Pearlman put the graphics on the console’s front panel so that the signal paths were easy to follow, and used sliders and slide switches so that the control and switch settings were easy to see.

“The first production run had blue panels, painted sheet-metal cases, and polished wood handles. ‘That’s not what I wanted,’ Pearlman recalls. ‘I wanted the instrument to be housed in a rugged case that would travel safely. But those were the days when nobody listened to you if you were over 30, so the young designer had his way.’ Musicians and retailers however quickly shot down the ‘Blue Marvin’ or ‘Blue Meanie’ design in favor of the vinyl-covered luggage-style case with the dark gray panel that remained in production from 1971 to 1981. ..

“As Roger Powell says, ‘The 2600’s main assets are the same things that made it hard to sell initially. The 2600 boiled down virtually all analog synthesis capabilities into a single box. You could experiment with it or use it pre-patched. It was a magic matrix, definitely enough stuff to use musically. On top of that, it stayed in tune and was reasonable robust and roadworthy.

“As analog synths went, it was easy to use. You could easily see and recognize panel setting patterns, even in the darkness of the stage. As one well-known 2600 user said many years ago, ‘It’s the only synth that I can operate when I’m drunk.’”

Source: Mark Vail, Vintage Synthesizers, Miller Freeman, Inc (pp. 78-79)

From Richard Kadrey

“The Synthia was yet another bid for the obviously limited high-end market for computerized all-in-one-box ultra-keyboards. Although the Synthia’s projected price was a mere $20,000, few musicians seem to have had a close encounter with a working model.

“The most, um, interesting aspect of the Synthia was its touch-responsive plasma screen, a computer display- cum-data-entry device that followed the user’s finger as he or she sketched around bar graphs, the ultimate in intuitive user interfaces.
“Among the touch-responsive displays were editing screens for harmonic content (up to seven partials), envelope parameters, keyboard setups, controller assignments, and, once again, an implementation of the timbre window concept (called ‘time slices’).

“The Synthia’s controller section was also particularly impressive. Four panel positions were available for sliders, joysticks, and touch plates, which could modulate a number of parameters including the pitches of individual harmonics. There were also three expression pedals, three switch pedals, and of course a velocity-and-aftertouch-sensitive keyboard. The accompanying computer, or ‘control unit,’ was housed in a separate box, and could accommodate incoming data from four keyboards.”