For 90 years, John Chowning has lived in constant motion. From his youth as a globetrotting music savant through a heyday of radical computing that revolutionised pop, the composer and programmer has taken scarcely a moment to buffer. And so it is when I video call his home in Palo Alto, California: he’s been tinkering with a musical composition, snuggled on a sofa in a hoodie. “I’m working all the time,” he says with an affable smile. “But I love my work, so it’s healthy.”
His assignment today is to resurrect Voices, a 2005 piece he will perform with his wife, Maureen, alongside a lecture at this week’s No Bounds festival in Sheffield. Chowning’s hearing and vision may be waning but, he says, “artists don’t retire. They create their art until they can’t.”
His diligence has made him a godfather of today’s pop, primarily thanks to his accidental discovery, in 1967, of digital frequency modulation – a new technology that completely upended the way synthesisers were made. It underpinned the groundbreaking Yamaha DX7, launched in 1983 as the world’s first affordable home synth, which soon infused 80s pop and R&B.
In 1984 alone, the DX7 featured prominently on Prince’s When Doves Cry, Tina Turner’s The Best and Sade’s Smooth Operator. Its electric piano preset has prickled neck hairs, for contrasting reasons, in the Twin Peaks theme and George Michael’s Careless Whisper. Throw a dart at a mid-80s pop chart and you will likely skewer a disciple of Chowning’s vision for modern sound.
Chowning says the DX7, with its easy setup and lustrous tones, “democratised computer music”. His proudest feature, its cartridge port, allowed composers such as Brian Eno – who once owned seven DX7s – to custom-make and share tones of their own invention.
But as a composer, pop has never been Chowning’s turf. He remains driven by a belief that flurries of clinking chimes, nervous groans and undulating pops can inspire euphoria as readily as A-ha’s Take on Me (another DX7 hit). Along the way, not everybody has agreed. A Stanford University colleague once accused him of dehumanising music. “No,” he responded. “I’m humanising computers.”
Today, Chowning’s esteemed standing suggests he won the argument, though he started with no trace of avant garde cachet. His parents scarcely acknowledged music until he was eight, when his engineer father agreed to fix a broken violin Chowning had spotted in the attic. The instrument was rescued, then it rescued him: he was a lacklustre student but, it turned out, a budding maestro. At 14, spellbound by a showcase in his high-school assembly, he charmed a drummer into giving him free drum lessons at his apartment. “That was the greatest joy,” he recalls. “Those lessons changed my life.”
They may have saved it, too. After high school, he passed an audition for the Navy School of Music in Washington DC, swerving the Korean war draft. The reward was a drum stool in an 18-piece band on a Mediterranean aircraft carrier. Unused to playing a full kit, Chowning “was deficient, and the band knew it”, he says. “The first months were miserable, but after, I blossomed.” He attributes his martial discipline to a penchant for awe. “I don’t stop. I become obsessed. If someone’s inspired, they inspire others.”
After returning to study in Ohio, he met Elisabeth Keller, a violinist in the university orchestra. In 1959 they married and moved to continue studies in Paris, where a performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s electronic work Kontakte gave Chowning an awakening. As conservative audience members booed, he craned to see the source of the abstract sounds pinging around the room – a spinning loudspeaker surrounded by four microphones.
In 1962, Chowning enrolled at Stanford in northern California to spread the gospel of electronic composition. He shrugged off a rejection from the music department and blagged an informal position at the university’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory – a new facility funded by the US Department of Defence, as part of Sputnik-era efforts to outpace Soviet technology. His faith in computers stemmed from a Science magazine article by the researcher Max Mathews with a novel proposal: given sufficient power, a computer and loudspeaker could generate any perceptible sound.
“I had no background at all in technology or math,” Chowning says. “Life had been music, music, music. So I educated myself by asking the computer scientists, engineers, psychologists and linguists working on early AI problems.” The relationship, he says, was one “of magical results for inquisitive people”.
Chowning soon started teaching conventional music classes at Stanford, but spent evenings in the lab exploring what he called “spatial illusions”: the impression, for instance, that a whisper is nearby or an explosion distant. Spatialisation appeals to our primal impulses, he says. “Is the predator close or far? It sends a signal right to the amygdala: freeze, fight or flee. It’s very compelling.”
He also developed a method of programming hyperspeed vibrato-like motion between two electronic notes. At a high frequency, the wobbly pitch merged into one thick tone. To his surprise, tweaking the inputs changed its timbre: one moment a gong-like drone, the next a reedy whistle.
Chowning had discovered digital frequency modulation, later called FM synthesis. He modestly describes it as a “a gift from nature”, but he worked hard to find it, pulling a string of all-nighters while his wife looked after their two children. “It was very hard on the family,” he admits. “After I’d helped put the kids to the bed and read them stories, I’d tell Elisabeth, ‘I’m gonna sleep for a little bit and then I’ll go up to the lab.’”
Did Elisabeth ever confront him? “She wrote me a note …” He frowns. It was 60 years ago; I imagine he has forgotten. Then he recites it, seemingly verbatim: “I can imagine being left alone because you have someone else. But never did I think I’d have to compete with a PDP-10 computer.”
“It was crushing,” he says. “But I understood.” His first composition to use FM and spatialisation, Sabelithe, was an anagram of his wife’s name. “She was moved.” To forgive him? “In a way, in a way. But it was still the same thing. To finish [second composition] Turenas, I had to work day and night…”
Chowning and Stanford shopped the FM patent to organ companies, and Yamaha took interest. But his application for tenure was rejected: “The music department chairman said, ‘But that’s just computers!’” Soon afterwards, Stanford welcomed the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, then a superstar after his Requiem featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I played him Sabelithe, and he was astonished,” Chowning recalls. “He said there was nothing like this in Europe.” Baffled by Chowning’s tenure snub, Ligeti arranged a grant for him to work in Berlin. By the time he returned, Yamaha had agreed to pay Stanford $50,000 a year – of which Chowning received a small portion – to license the FM patent. “I signed over all the rights to Stanford for $1 and they took all the risk and did the patent searches,” he says. “And that was the best decision I ever made, because I was not interested at all in the legal aspects. I just wanted to do my work.”
Yamaha clearly meant business, and flew Chowning out to help a 100-strong team of engineers fine-tune FM. A decade of sporadic visits passed before the launch, in 1981, of the Yamaha GS-1 – it was prohibitively expensive but its successor, the $1,995 DX7, was a sensation.
“The FM stands for the future of music,” read one ad – as far from the previous analogue synthesisers “as a computer is from an abacus”. In a boxout, Quincy Jones – who had studied with the same elite teacher as Chowning in Paris, Nadia Boulanger – praised his technology for “letting me capture the mood I’m after without having to think about it”. The DX7 produced some of Jones’s greatest hooks, including Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal bassline and much of the Thriller LP.
News from pop culture barely reached Chowning, who was immersed in new compositions, Stria and Phoné, delving further into FM’s rich timbral potential. In 1975, he had founded an electronic music hub at Stanford, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (often pronounced Karma), that – funded by decades of patent royalties from Yamaha – remains in rude health, ensuring modern composers such as Holly Herndon will never be told their work is “just computers”.
By 1991, approaching 60, Chowning was discovering time to relax. On Sunday evenings, he would cycle to the opera night at a local lounge bar. “One of the singers was far superior,” he remembers, “and that was Maureen.” For six months, he watched his future wife perform without more than a passing compliment. A chance encounter at a record store dissolved his modesty. “You know me from the opera night,” he said. “Do you wanna have a coffee?”
Today, ahead of the Sheffield show, Maureen is in her studio mapping the microtonal nooks of her husband’s punishing Voices piece. “You need good ears to sing it,” he says, “but she has good ears.” He shares his screen to show me a bewildering array of symbols, arranged in his own editing software. A recent eye condition briefly made his laptop screen indecipherable. “But it doesn’t really deter me,” he says, preparing to return to work. “I say to myself, keep moving. Don’t stop. Once you stop moving, it’s all over.”