Adventure in Sound

On the stage in U.C.L.A.'s Royce Hall last week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Conductor Zubin Mehta got ready to play. Unlike most concertgoers, the audience fastened its attention not on the musicians but on Syn-Ket, a strange instrument set on a table in mid-stage.

It was equipped with three tiny keyboards, stacked like the manuals of a pipe organ; vines of wires drooped down from their sockets. It looked like a kiddie's toy piano hooked up to a telephone switchboard.

When Composer-Pianist John Eaton, 33, began to play his Concert Piece for Syn-Ket and Symphony Orchestra, the audience quickly discovered that there was nothing childish about the instrument. Syn-Ket is the first machine capable of performing electronic music "live" in the concert hall. Like the various sound synthesizers that have preceded it, Syn-Ket can approximate known instrumental and noninstrumental sounds--and create a few that are not so well known. It does not have all the range and flexibility of those synthesizers, but it does have one advantage. They normally put their sounds onto tape, which is then brought into the concert hall and fed into a playback machine. The Syn-Ket eliminates the need for this, since it is played like an instrument.

Just how useful this can be was demonstrated by the easy, give-and-take, concertolike dialogue between orchestra and Syn-Ket. With the orchestra divided into two sections tuned a quarter tone apart, Eaton's Concert Piece was able to achieve a dense, microtonal fabric of sound that would have made even Charles Ives envious. Though the Syn-Ket started out with the familiar blips, snaps and bee-swarming sounds usually associated with electronic music, it soon proved its special if not necessarily pleasing power with waves of organ-rich tones and descending spirals of patterned trills. "This was an adventure in sound," said Mehta later. "We must remember that when Petrouchka was first performed, it wasn't pleasing to the ears. The Syn-Ket has an immense future."

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