Sadly, I’m almost certain Dr. Chowning wouldn’t enjoy it. But I have to cop to the fact that FM’s mostly impacted my life via the YM2612 and the Genesis/Mega Drive games that blew my mind as an impressionable youth.
So when I write something FM-only, I lean pretty heavily into that:
Our Bay Area synth group visited Dr. Chowning at Stanford last year. He presented his lecture on the discovery of FM and all the people/research/stories that went into it, as well as the subsequent work he did on related concepts.
Great guy, and he was happy to hear about all of our modern day FM noodling, I’m sure he would love this thread. We gifted him a Volca FM mk2 so hopefully he’s doing some noodling of his own.
He sounds like a really down to earth guy. The other day I found this lovely thank you note that John wrote to Yamaha expressing his gratitude to them for adopting his baby and bringing it into the world. Really seems to have the same sort of essence of being as the person in your story and I love the continuity of character as it seems to make him a real person in three dimensions even for someone who has never met him.
Yeah, can’t stress enough what a humble and good dude he is. He credits a lot of people for supporting him on the journey to FM, lots of people who he learned from and helped make all of this synthesizer business possible. He’s also quick to correct anyone who would say he “invented” FM, he’d stop them mid-sentence to insist that he merely “discovered” it.
Here’s a photo of us in one of the audio research rooms at Stanford (Dr. Chowning gave us a tour of the various facilities at CCRMA, lots of cool stuff going on there):
I noticed that he was very deliberate about calling it “an idea” rather than “my idea” which speaks volumes about him as a person. Great follow up photo too!
Orpheus Sounds, the podcast of the Orpheus Institute, has just released a special episode dedicated to John Chowning. You can find it on on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or on Libsyn: Orpheus Sounds
