People of Music Tech: Ray Kurzweil

The first time I heard about Ray Kurzweil was when someone showed me a TED video, I think, where he was talking about Singularity.

What's singularity, you ask?

Singularity is the point in the future when artificial intelligence will be finally better than human intelligence.

Exactly like the movie The Matrix.

Singularity also happens to be an awesome song by Textures.





It sounds like crazy talk but he makes a lot of sense, and he thought it was really important, and he co-founded of The Singularity University where people discuss the implications of Singularity happening, whether to prevent it, or whatever. And apparently other things.

He's also an inventor, a futurist and right now, director of engineering at Google. He's also written a lot of crazy books.

But what does he have to do with music?

So apparently Ray founded his first company at the age of 25, Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc and he invented the the first omni-font optical character recognition system and also the Kurzweil Reading Machine; It was a handy scanner that blind people could use to scan text, and the machine would read it out to them.

Now this is where Stevie Wonder comes into the picture; Stevie is an extremely talented and popular blind musician and it so happened that him and Ray were really good friends. One day they were talking about how the synthesizers and other electronic instruments were no match compared to the grand piano.

This is when Ray must have thought "Oh, we're pretty good at synthesizing sound from computers and stuff, I don't think it will be too hard to replicate the sounds of a grand piano", and later went on to start Kurzweil Music Systems.


They came out with their first synthesizer, the K250. It was the first electronic musical instrument which produced sound derived from sampled sounds burned onto integrated circuits known as Read Only Memory (ROM), and the cool thing was, you could update the software on these ROM's, which was pretty crazy at the time!
They now have more than twenty models of keyboards and synthesizers and they are used by many, many artists.

So thank you, Mr. Kurzweil for your contribution to music technology, other things, and for generally being a crazy mofo.

Check out Supersition by Stevie Wonder!