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Various Artists[eml002] Synthecom 1990 (January 1, 1990)

"Music has come a long way..."

Yamaha DX7 generation pop songs litter this album representing the taste of "electronic music" in 1990 in Singapore. The album opens up with an orchestral track probably done using General MIDI sounds and serves more as a proof of concept than anything. A few choices of more electronic sounding tracks such as Song of IDone, License to Drive, Storm on Canvas and In the Dark / On The Rite make their appearances here signifying a shift of the Electronic Music Lab sound to a more electronic one.


This audio is part of the collection: Electronic Music Lab, Singapore

Author: Various Artists
Date: 1990-01-01
Keywords: electronic, pop, orchestral, Electronic Music Lab, Singapore

Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

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Reviewer: Benjamin Ang - - December 26, 2006
Subject: Clarification - voice from the past
1. Kent Ridge Fantasia
- Composed by Mr Joseph Peters, an established composer, former music director of the EML, now heading another department at the National University of Singapore. Joe is a classical composer, and he (hand) wrote the score for this epic piece. Victor Pang, one of EML's founding tutors, then manually input the score via step input using sequencer software on an Atari. Hats off to Joe for composing this epic, which was performed with dancers, lights, and Prof Victor Savage (NUS) delivering spoken word. Hats off also to Victor for keying in the entire score by step input, including complex changes of time signature.

- In 1990, General MIDI had not been invented yet. Joe and Victor had a complex MIDI patchbay by which the Atari controlled a dozen hardware synths/rackmounts. Each synth/rackmount would produce between one to 8 (maximum) timbres. They included the Kurzweill HX Horn Expander (all brass sounds!), SX String Expander (all string sounds!), Korg M1R (one of the first ever digital synth workstations), Kawai K1 (hot item, very affordable digital multi-timbral synth), Roland Alpha Juno 2 (last of the real analog), and Roland S-550 sampler (last of the hardware samplers, using 3.5" disks).

- For this track, EML students went around the campus and recorded different sounds (footsteps, library turnstile, dot matrix printer!), sampled into the Roland S-550, and added to the sequence.