X-Nico

6 unusual facts about Wendy Carlos


15 equal temperament

The American musician Wendy Carlos used 15-ET as one of two scales in the track Afterlife from the album Tales of Heaven and Hell.

Bob Moog Foundation

His instruments have been included in recordings by Wendy Carlos, Keith Emerson, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder, Yes and a host of others.

Hideki Matsutake

Matsutake was grabbed by the playback of Wendy Carlos's Switched-On Bach using a synthesizer and a computer at the American Pavilion of Expo '70 in Osaka.

Homer Dudley

His development of artificial speech was elaborated upon by others to produce methods of artificial speech for humans unable to use their vocal cords (as with the voice synthesizer used by Stephen Hawking), and by electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos, Robert Moog and the German musical group Kraftwerk.

PAiA Electronics

For a time, the image of the audio synthesizer was that of an enormous modular system, which could take up entire walls of studios and were only available to the few musicians that could afford them (such as Keith Emerson and Wendy Carlos).

The Little Red Songbook

In 1998, the subject persona of the song, Wendy Carlos, who had first come to fame releasing albums under the alias Walter Carlos, sued Momus for $22 million.


The Dream Weaver

The album was said by Wright to be the first-ever all-synthesizer/keyboard album (though there were many all-synthesizer LPs before this, including Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos, in 1968) - it features Wright on vocals and keyboards and Jim Keltner and Andy Newmark on drums.


see also

Pierluigi Giombini

It was Wendy Carlos' Switched-On Bach records that inspired him to study and create the synth sounds that he later used on his hit records in the 1980s.