Jul 21, 2020
Dorothy Siegel, Pioneer in Computer
Music
I'm Kay Savetz, and this is ANTIC: The Atari 8-bit podcast. This
interview, however, is about events that happened before Atari
released its first computers.
This interview is with Dorothy Siegel, a pioneer in computer music.
The music she created was on an IMSAI 8080 computer and a
clarinet.
The First Philadelphia Computer Music Festival was held August 25,
1978 as part of a show called Personal Computing '78 held at the
Philadelphia Civic Center. In 1979, Creative Computing Magazine
published a record album, also titled First Philadelphia Computer
Music Festival. The 12" 33 RPM record was of music performed at the
festival: 18 pieces, including Dorthy's.
Dorothy was co-founder of Newtech, along with her husband Michael
Abram and business partner Stuart Newfeld, a company that built
add-on music cards for two S-100 bus computers: the IMSAI 8080 and
the Southwest Technical Products Corporation 6800. The Newtech
Music Cards cost $59.95 each. (Newtech was not the same company as
NewTek, the company that sold the Video Toaster in the 1990s.)
Dorothy performed Johann Wanhal's Rondo from Sonata in B-flat for
Clarinet and Piano. The IMSAI, with three Newtech music boards,
performed the piano part, and Dorothy accompanied it on
clarinet.
I'm going to play the song now. It's about four minutes long.
Regarding Dorothy's song, the album notes read: "Newtech's music
card for the S-100 bus is essentially a digital-to-analog converter
controlled by an output port on the computer. The analog output is
fed into amplifiers to be heard. This approach to computer music
synthesis is extremely flexible since hypothetically any possible
sound can be created. In actual practice the performance of the
music circuitry is somewhat limited by the speed of the host
computer. Each card can produce up to three voices output to one
channel.
Newtech's music software consists of a BASIC program which converts
music into binary tables, and a machine-language interpreter to
play the music with three voices and different envelopes. The piece
on this record uses three cards each playing one voice."
Check the show notes for an extensive list of links to people that
we talk about and the articles that Dorothy wrote for ROM Magazine
and Popular Electronics. You can hear the entire First Philadelphia
Computer Music Festival at VintageComputerMusic.com or
buy the album on a remastered audio CD directly from Dave Ahl of
Creative Computing Magazine.
This interview took place January 7, 2014, when I was doing
research for a book about the first personal computer magazines.
Although I've decided not to write the book, I am publishing the
interviews that I did while doing the research.
Personal
Computing '78 flyer
Popular
Electronics magazine, January 1975
Edward
Miller's Piece for Clarinet & Tape
Stan Viet
Electro-Harmonix
ANTIC Interview 332 - Mike Matthews, founder of
Electro-Harmonix
ANTIC Interview 280 - David and Betsy Ahl, Creative Computing
Magazine
Samuel Abram,
Dorothy's son
ROM
Magazine Issue 4: Scott Joplin on Your Sci-Fi Hi-Fi by Dorothy
Siegel
ROM
Magazine Issue 5: Make Me More Music, Maestro Micro by Dorothy
Siegel
Popular Electronics November 1979: CP/M: The Standard Microcomputer
Software Interface by Dorothy Siegel
Listen to/download
First Philadelphia Computer Music Festival album
Buy the album on
a remastered audio CD from Dave Ahl