When do you first recall hearing a synthesiser?

In music, or otherwise.

I'm trying to remember the first time I recognised a sound as synthesised. Possibly, specifically in a musical way, but any other also.

 

1977

 

Video Killed The Radio Star.

 

I'm going with telephone receiver.

Possibly 1972.

But, I'll give you 1977 for this...

 

Has to be a film, or TV sound effect?

 

Apparently I bopped around in my pram whenever it was played.

 

No. We've done that.

Has to be TV, or film sound effects surely? Or, radio??? A radio play?

 

Hold on. First electronic door bell?

 

You asked when we first recalled hearing a synth.
I replied....because that was the first time I heard a synth
Now you're looking for a fucking history lesson on synths?

Ach

 

I asked "synthesised sound".

I am now thinking it must be the first electronic alarm clock. Possibly a Binatone radio/alram clock.

And, I mean synthesised sound, not an electric bell.

 

OK. I said synthesiser. I meant synthetic sound

 

Thread title:
When do you first recall hearing a synthesiser?

 

As in a sound created by a synthesiser

 

It’ll be the Doctor Who theme, shorely?

 

Or just sticking your ear to a synthesiser and hearing some creaking due to cooling.

Maybe.

Prob not.

 

Could be for most.

I'm still thinking Binatone.

 

It's a car horn.

 

Binatone?? Do you mean a kind of stylophone - that Rolf Harris ad could be pre-DW, at least before I recognised DW as being so.

 

Did you listen to it at the seaside?

 

Nope. Here you go...

 

Probably this if it was created on a Synthesiser. In the the darkened School hall of Cunningham Hill Junior School St. Albans in the mid 1970s. The TV was wheeled in on stilts and it had side and top panels to cut out some of the ambient light. All the curtains had be drawn as well.

 

Yeah, but the question is "when do you first *recall* hearing a synthesiser".

Which is a neat question because it could be asking when is your first musical memory involving a synthesiser, or it could be when was your first musical memory when you heard it was a synthesiser and *knew* it was a synthesiser.

In which case *Video Killed The Radio Star".

 

maybe Vangelis' score for Chariots Of Fire

 

Pong. A long time ago.

 

Police disco 1976/77. Orpington iirc. Crossing to the right sound of the tracks

I 'think' it may have been O O o o.. I feel love

 

1972

 

I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was about six years old and living in Malawi. It felt like paradise. We used to wake up to the sound of the hippos in the nearby river. I miss that sound even to this day.

We weren't allowed to go out at night as it was too dangerous. Lions and hyenna roamed the area around our house and sometimes you could hear them scratching at the door and along the wooden boards of the veranda.

One night I awoke and couldn't sleep, so I went to the living area. I hadn't realised at the time that Dad had forgotten to bolt the door and it had blown open in the wind, and it was that that had woken me.

With tired eyes I looked out into the bush and the mist and then I saw something moving. Moving towards me.

I rubbed my eyes trying to get rid of the sleep so I could get a better look, and when I lowered my hands it was there, slithering towards me. It stood up on its end and before I could move, I was face to face with a large black Roland DX7 Analogue Synthesizer.

It let out this otherworldly shriek, like nothing I'd ever heard before, and then it lunged.

My mother had woken up and arrived just in time to pull me inside and shutter the door. But it was too late. I had been bitten by the bug, and I've been into electronic music ever since.

True story.

 

This from the BBC series Tales From Europe in 1964, my uncle, a proud owner and Hammond organ player told us parts of this were electronically synthesised. Sadly he was more James Last than James Taylor Quartet!
Probably heard the original Dr Who first, but this was the first time I remember the word synthesise being used.