The Kurzweil K250, manufactured by
Kurzweil Music Systems
Kurzweil Music Systems is an American company that produces electronic musical instruments. It was founded in 1982 by Stevie Wonder (musician), Ray Kurzweil (innovator) and Bruce Cichowlas (software developer).
Kurzweil was a developer of Opti ...
, was an early
electronic musical instrument which produced sound from
sampled sounds compressed in
ROM
Rom, or ROM may refer to:
Biomechanics and medicine
* Risk of mortality, a medical classification to estimate the likelihood of death for a patient
* Rupture of membranes, a term used during pregnancy to describe a rupture of the amniotic sac
* ...
, faster than common mass storage such as a
disk drive
Disk storage (also sometimes called drive storage) is a general category of storage mechanisms where data is recorded by various electronic, magnetic, optical, or mechanical changes to a surface layer of one or more rotating disks. A disk drive is ...
.
Acoustic sounds from brass, percussion, string and woodwind instruments as well as sounds created using
waveform
In electronics, acoustics, and related fields, the waveform of a signal is the shape of its graph as a function of time, independent of its time and magnitude scales and of any displacement in time.David Crecraft, David Gorham, ''Electro ...
s from
oscillators were utilized. Designed for professional musicians, it was invented by
Raymond Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil ( ; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and e ...
, founder of Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc.,
Kurzweil Music Systems
Kurzweil Music Systems is an American company that produces electronic musical instruments. It was founded in 1982 by Stevie Wonder (musician), Ray Kurzweil (innovator) and Bruce Cichowlas (software developer).
Kurzweil was a developer of Opti ...
and
Kurzweil Educational Systems
Kurzweil Education (formerly Kurzweil Educational Systems) is an American-based company that provides educational technology.
Kurzweil Education provides literacy solutions, tools and training for those with learning differences and challenges, ...
with consultation from
Stevie Wonder;
Lyle Mays
Lyle David Mays (November 27, 1953 – February 10, 2020) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and member of the Pat Metheny Group. Metheny and Mays composed and arranged nearly all of the group's music, for which Mays won eleven Grammy Awa ...
, an American jazz pianist;
Alan R. Pearlman, founder of
ARP Instruments Inc.; and
Robert Moog
Robert Arthur Moog ( ; May 23, 1934 – August 21, 2005) was an American engineer and electronic music pioneer. He was the founder of the synthesizer manufacturer Moog Music and the inventor of the first commercial synthesizer, the Moog synthesi ...
, inventor of the
Moog synthesizer.
History
In the mid-1970s, Raymond Kurzweil invented the first multi-font
reading machine A reading machine is a piece of assistive technology that allows blind people to access printed materials. It scans text, converts the image into text by means of optical character recognition and uses a speech synthesizer to read out what it has ...
for the blind, consisting of the earliest
CCD flat-bed scanner and
text-to-speech
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal langua ...
synthesizer. In 1976, Stevie Wonder heard about the demonstration of this new machine on ''
The Today Show
''Today'' (also called ''The Today Show'' or informally, ''NBC News Today'') is an American news and talk morning television show that airs weekdays from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. on NBC. The program debuted on January 14, 1952. It ...
'', and later became the user of the first production Kurzweil Reading Machine, beginning a long-term association between them.
[
]
In 1982 Stevie Wonder invited Raymond Kurzweil to his new studio in Los Angeles, and asked if "we could use the extraordinarily flexible computer control methods on the beautiful sounds of acoustic instruments?" In response, Raymond Kurzweil founded
Kurzweil Music Systems
Kurzweil Music Systems is an American company that produces electronic musical instruments. It was founded in 1982 by Stevie Wonder (musician), Ray Kurzweil (innovator) and Bruce Cichowlas (software developer).
Kurzweil was a developer of Opti ...
, with Stevie Wonder as musical advisor.
[ Kurzweil used the sampling technique that had been exploited in ]reading machine A reading machine is a piece of assistive technology that allows blind people to access printed materials. It scans text, converts the image into text by means of optical character recognition and uses a speech synthesizer to read out what it has ...
s (such as the Kurzweil Reading Machine) and adapted it for music. Reading machines sample the characters in a text document to produce an image. The machines convert the light and dark areas of the image into text data
In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete Value_(semiotics), values that convey information, describing quantity, qualitative property, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of sy ...
stored in (RAM) and/or (EPROM), then output spoken text with a text-to-speech synthesizer.
Sound reproduction technique
The Kurzweil K250 utilizes a similar concept: Sounds are sampled, compressed & converted into digital data, stored in ROM and reproduced as sound via 12 separate DACs and analog envelopes (CEM 3335), which are programmed to simulate the dynamics and sustain of the original sound.. This method was called 'contoured modelling' by Kurzweil in marketing material and regarded as a proprietary scheme. Bob Moog, then a consultant at Kurzweil, was asked about the method in an article in ''Electronic Sound Maker'' in 1985:
This method greatly reduced the number of then-expensive EPROMS needed whilst maintaining the dynamics of the sound, which would be otherwise compromised by compression. The CEM 3335 integrated voltage controlled amplifier
A variable-gain (VGA) or voltage-controlled amplifier (VCA) is an electronic amplifier that varies its gain depending on a control voltage (often abbreviated CV).
VCAs have many applications, including audio level compression, synthesizers and am ...
CEM 3335 datasheet
/ref> provided exponential gain to reconstruct the dynamics that were lost in the compression.
A prototype of the Kurzweil K250 was manufactured for Stevie Wonder in 1983. It featured Braille
Braille (Pronounced: ) is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired, including people who are blind, deafblind or who have low vision. It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille disp ...
buttons along with sliders (potentiometer
A potentiometer is a three-terminal resistor with a sliding or rotating contact that forms an adjustable voltage divider. If only two terminals are used, one end and the wiper, it acts as a variable resistor or rheostat.
The measuring instrum ...
s) for various controls and functions, an extensive choice of acoustic and synthesized sounds, a sampler to record sounds onto RAM and a music sequencer with battery-backed RAM for composition. During production of the Kurzweil K250, at least five units were manufactured for Stevie Wonder.
The Kurzweil K250 was unveiled during the 1984 Summer NAMM
The NAMM Show is an annual event in the United States that is organized by the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), who describe it as "the industry’s largest stage, uniting the global music, sound and entertainment technology commun ...
music industry trade show. The Kurzweil K250 was manufactured until 1990, initially as an 88-key fully weighted keyboard or as an expander unit without keys called the Kurzweil K250 XP. A few years later, a rack mount version called the Kurzweil K250RMX also became available.
The Kurzweil K250 was the first electronic instrument to faithfully reproduce the sounds of an acoustic grand piano{{citation needed, date=November 2018. It could play up to 12 notes simultaneously (known as 12-note polyphony
Polyphony ( ) is a type of musical texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice, monophony, or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords, ...
) by utilizing individual sounds as well as layered sounds (playing multiple sounds on the same note simultaneously, also known as being multitimbral
Monotimbral (from the root prefix ''mono'' meaning one, and ''timbre'' meaning a specific tone of a sound independent of its pitch) is usually used in reference to electronic synthesizers which can produce a single timbre at a given pitch when pre ...
). Until then the majority of electronic keyboards utilized synthesized sounds and emulated acoustical instrument sounds created in other electronic instruments using various waveforms produced by oscillators, and prior to that there were instruments such as the mellotron and orchestron which used tape loops. Five other manufactured digital sampled sound musical instruments were available at that time: E-mu Corporation's E-mu Emulator
The Emulator is a series of digital sampling synthesizers using floppy disk storage, manufactured by E-mu Systems from 1981 until 2002. Though not the first commercial sampler, the Emulator was among the first to find wide use among ordinary mu ...
and E-mu Emulator II; Fairlight Corporation's Fairlight CMI
The Fairlight CMI (short for Computer Musical Instrument) is a digital synthesizer, sampler, and digital audio workstation introduced in 1979 by Fairlight.
— with links to some Fairlight history and photos
It was based on a commercial lic ...
; and New England Digital's Synclavier I and Synclavier II.
Audio
* "All I Ask of You" – from: Phantom of the Opera composed by: Andrew Lloyd Webber – performed by Christopher McGilton and Nancy Smith using the Kurzweil 250 solely as the accompanimen
* "Gesù bambino" composed by: Pietro A. Yon – performed by Christopher McGilton and Nancy Smith using the Kurzweil 250 solely as the accompanimen
* Christopher Yavelow – Countdown (For the Nuclear Age) – The World's First Computer Opera, completely synchronized from the baton of the conductor to the Kurzweil K25
* Christopher McGilton – Religious/Sacred Music in .mp3 format performed on the Kurzweil 250 and Yamaha MU-50/80 Sound Modul
o
* Craig D. Tollis – The Happy Frog: Kurzweil K250 – Two demo recordings of the Kurzweil 25
* Jane Brockman – Kurzweil Études: original compositions performed on the Kurzweil 250, listen to 3 excerpts from the Opus One recordin
http://www.janebrockman.org/music/KurzEt7.ra
* Pamela J. Marshall – Spindrift Recordings – Noises, Sounds & Strange Airs, "Child's Pla
* Pauline Oliveros – Dear. John: A Canon on the Name of Cag
* Steven Johannessen – K250 Demo Music Showcase at the Middle Of Nowher
* The Kurzweil 250 Rock Block – Play the 45 RPM Kurzweil 250 Demo Record virtually
* The Kurzweil Rocks! – Play the 45 RPM Kurzweil 250 Demo Record virtuall
* The Virtual Kurzweil 250 Sound Sheet – Play the 45 RPM Kurzweil 250 Demo Record virtuall
* Philipp Koltsov – Russian composer & pianist plays Kurzweil 250's patch #1 Grandpiano Dem
Audio and video
* ASJ Avantius – Muzika u domaćoj kinematografiji ( II DEO
* Bach's Nightmare: The Ultimate Rape, or The Art of Kitsc
* CBS News Interview with Joel Spiegelman in September 1988 on New Age Bach and the Kurzweil 250
* Chick Corea Electrik Band – "The Dragon" (Note the Kurzweil 250 is to Chick's left on the bottom and string sounds are played on it during the performance
* Christopher McGilton – "Magnificat" performed on the Kurzweil 250 and Yamaha MU-80 Sound Module â€
* Christopher McGilton – "No Greater Love" performed on the Kurzweil 250 and Yamaha MU-80 Sound Module â€
* Clinton S. Clark – Film Scoring Portfoli
* FX – Kevin Loch at Lisner Auditorium, Nov. 8, 198
* Joel Spiegelman Interview on the Joe Franklin Show, August 198
* Keith Emerson – Emerson, Lake and Powell with Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra on the Late Show with David Letterman (Note that two Kurzweil K250's are being played live – one by Keith Emerson and the other by Paul Shaffer
* Kurzweil – It all started with Ray Kurzweil – The story of Stevie Wonder's technical challenge to Ray Kurzweil that ultimately motivates the inception of Kurzweil Music Systems
* Kurzweil 250 Demo Cassette (Jazz / Orchestral demo from a great sampler-synth
* Kurzweil 250 Demo Cassette (with voiceover explaining history and features
* Kurzweil 250 Rock Block Demo 33 1/3 RPM Recor
* Mutabaruka – "The Mystery Unfolds
* Pat Metheny Group – "Daulton Lee" (information in Italian
* Ray Kurzweil – Ray Kurzweil Appearing on Worldnet – Demonstration of the Kurzweil 25
* Robert Estrin – Piano Questions: A Great Digital Piano – The Kurzweil K25
* Santino Famulari – "La Campanella" on a Kurzweil 250 â€
* Steven Johannessen – Visual Music Showcase at the Middle Of Nowher
* The Big Cruise – "Don Lampasone" (ASCAP
* The Mosquit
* Wayne Shorter Quartet – "The Last Silk Hat" (North Sea Jazz, 1986
References
External links
* Sound on Sound – Size Does Matter Kurzweil K250 Workstation Keyboard (Retro
* Sound on Sound – Synth Secret
* The Age of Spiritual Machine
o
* The Man and the Machine:An Interview With Ray Kurzwei
* Time Magazine – Can We Talk? An article about Speech-to-Text recognition and about the Kurzweil 25
* Virtual Organ – Virtual Instruments:Joe Barron, Present at the 1984 NAMM Show when the Kurzweil 250 was introduced
* What's New In Electronic Music; The Art Advances At Warp Drive: A. Arnold Anderson, New York Time
* Synthony's Synth & MIDI Museu
* Mastering the Kurzweil 250, Volume One: User's Guide and Volume Two: Reference Manual, Copyright 1988 Kurzweil Music Systems, Inc
* Synrise – Brief information on the Kurzweil 250 (In German
* Byrd, Donald, & Christopher Yavelow, Yavelow, Christopher (1986). The Kurzweil 250 Digital Synthesizer. Computer Music Journal 10, no. 1, pp. 64–8
External links
Kurzweil Music Systems
Kurzweil K250 Users' Group
The Audio Playground Synthesizer Museum
Kurzweil synthesizers
Samplers (musical instrument)