The Enabling Instrument: Milton Babbitt and the RCA Synthesizer

Abstract

In this paper, I review some of the claims about electronic sound synthesis and human subjectivity that were made in the name of RCA’s first electroacoustic sound synthesiser, as it was understood by its various sponsors in the American military-industrial-academic-cultural complex. As described by Harry Olson, head of the corporation’s acoustics research division, RCA’s Mark I synthesiser was intended to be ‘a musical instrument with no limitations whatsoever.’ I argue that the promise of RCA’s limitless musical instrument began at the University of Iowa, with an embryonic effort to define and quantify musical talent. When it emerged fully-formed from RCA’s Princeton-based acoustics laboratory, the synthesiser represented Cold War cultural and economic supremacy by channelling wartime innovations in signal processing, information theory, and cybernetics into the service of a booming American entertainment industry. As centrepiece of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio, the synthesiser was conscripted by the composer Milton Babbitt to realise an ongoing experiment in art and psychoacoustics, linking twelve-tone composition, information theory, positivist epistemology, and psychoacoustics. Babbitt’s ideas about composition as experimentation, I will suggest, supported a vision of human rather than mechanical potential—and of the autonomous artist as a Cold War liberal, a heroic figure more enduring than RCA’s celebrated machine.