This is Richard Pew’s second Timelines contribution. He describes twists and turns in designing a groundbreaking digital synthesizer—inspired by Stevie Wonder and built by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is the inventor also known for pioneering work in optical character recognition (OCR), speech technologies, and predictions that we are bearing down on a technological singularity. Pew was program chair for the first official CHI Conference in 1983 and participated on three panels at CHI’86. He has been president of the Human Factors Society and was the first chair of the National Research Council Committee on Human Factors. —Jonathan Grudin

An Exciting Interface Foray
into Early Digital Music:
The Kurzweil 250
Richard W. Pew

BBN Technologies | [e-mail]

The name Raymond Kurzweil is likely to be familiar to most readers. One of his many inventions, the Kurzweil 250, was the first 88-key polyphonic digital synthesizer on which chords could be played and that was capable of realistic reproduction of the sound of a grand piano and other acoustic instruments based on digital sampling and recording of real sounds. Stevie Wonder knew of Kurzweil because of the latter’s earlier invention of a reading aid for the blind and interest in building a synthesizer, Wonder asked Kurzweil if he could create an electronic musical instrument specifically adapted for him. Because Wonder represented the kind of professional musician Kurzweil wanted to cultivate as a user and advocate for his instrument, he actually created a Braille prototype of the synthesizer.

With the expected functional complexity and a target selling price of $1,000, the design of the new machine presented a significant and very interesting challenge. For BBN Technologies, the opportunity to confront that challenge came in the summer of 1982. It all started when I received a phone call from Aaron Kleiner, a principal in the New York– based startup company Kurzweil Music Systems, who asked if I would undertake the human factors design and packaging of “a revolutionary keyboard-based electronic music synthesizer.” The only thing I was not to be responsible for was the piano-like keyboard because Kurzweil had a “friend” who had invented a way to make a keyboard that simulated the feel and percussive dynamics of a real piano.

There was no formal request for proposal. My colleague Carl Feehrer and I were shown a glossy prospectus that pictured (opposite page) and touted the features of this unusual machine for the benefit of potential investors. There appeared to be no one else invited to compete for this HCI opportunity. They wanted a proposal now and a completed, detailed specification within six months. At BBN we called

such an inquiry a “bluebird”—an unsolicited opportunity that just “flew in the window.” Since neither Carl nor I nor anyone at BBN had real experience with the packaging aspects of industrial design, we immediately located an industrial design collaborator, Paul Brefka of Latham, Brefka Associates in Boston. Both Carl and I could claim human factors expertise, but Carl was trained in music and I had no real music experience at all, except that I survived listening to my son “percuss” daily on his drum set in the basement. We acquired a Casio VL- 1, almost a toy, for under $30 just to find out what a keyboard synthesizer was all about.

Together with Brefka, we submitted brief proposals, and after a financial negotiation during which BBN refused to accept stock in the fledgling company with an uncertain future in lieu of cash payment for our work, we embarked on a brief but fascinating project.

We immediately broke up into two teams. Brefka worked with the mechanical and electrical engineers on packaging constraints and specifications. The human factors team included Pew, Feehrer, a rock musician, and two or three Kurzweil employees—“software gurus,” one of whom was accomplished both as an electronic and acoustical engineer and as a musician. We were given a very detailed 300-page technical specification for the instrument’s functional characteristics and circuit design that we were told had been written single-handedly by Ray Kurzweil. We visited local music studios and synthesizer repair shops to acquire the requisite contextual data about the use, programming, and repair of such instruments. We had two kinds of meetings at Kurzweil headquarters— weekly design meetings of the two teams independently and, less frequently, coordination meetings of the combined staff.