Nov 21, 2017
Frank Schwartz and Richard Lewis,
Virtusonics
Last last year, I received a batch of Atari disks. One of the
disks was labeled Virtuoso Play Mode Sampler — a music
demonstration disk from Virtusonics, a company I had never heard
of.
Thanks to some old articles in Antic magazine, I learned a bit
about the product and the company. In 1985, Nat Friedland first
wrote
about the Virtuoso software: "Virtuoso is such a unique new
approach to musicmaking that it's not easy to describe. ...
Virtuoso gives you a user-friendly method of tapping the extremely
fast and powerful changes that a computer can control in every
aspect of music performance. It bypasses the limits of traditional
musical notation and uses an almost self-explanatory color graphic
display that delivers mathematical insights into the structure of
music. ... In technical terms, Virtuoso is a sound generator that
produces four voices from the POKEY chip. You can make instant
real-time changes in the voices in any of six parameters. Four
computers running Virtuoso can be linked together to have up to 16
independent channels controlled by one Atari."
Virtusonics was primarily three people: Frank Schwartz, the
programmer; Joseph Lyons, the music guy; and Richard Lewis, the
CEO. I have interviewed two of them. First you'll hear my February
15, 2017 interview with the programmer/R&D director Frank
Schwartz. Then, you'll hear the February 10, 2017 interview with
CEO Richard Lewis. I haven't been able to interview the other
partner, Joseph Lyons, who is serving 24 years to life in
prison.
After our interview, Richard Lewis sent me an envelope of
Virtusonics
papers and disks. The material includes the preliminary version
of Virtuoso Software, and the final release which by then was
called Virtuoso Desktop Performance Studio, boxes, manuals, flyers
and advertising slicks, and stock prospectuses. I scanned and
digitized all of the material, which is now available at the
Internet Archive.
Teaser quotes:
Frank Schwartz: "Change the curvature of the sine wave just
via software. And that was a concept which was revolutionary in
those days."
Richard Lewis: "We were criticized by a lot of the top names
in computers back in the '80s. As, how that this small company in
an apartment in New York City come up with something that we've
been working on for years and we cant do?"