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1962: MILTON BABBITT and the Music Machine | Monitor | Retro Tech | BBC Archive
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21:57Now Playing"No musical instrument can play in this register with both this speed and this kind of envelope." - Milton Babbitt.
Huw Wheldon visits the Engineering Department of the University of Colombia, where Milton Babbitt - a mathematician and music theorist who is one of the world's leading composers of electronic music - is hard at work on the extraordinary RCA Mark II Synthesizer. Babbitt is testing both the limits of the machine itself, and the limits of human perception.
What can we learn from this remarkable music machine, that can produce sequences of sounds that greatly exceed the performing capacity of any musician using conventional instruments?
Clip taken from Monitor, originally broadcast on BBC Television, 30 September, 1962.
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