The Gooch Synthetic Woodwind

In the late 1970's while I was a student at the University of Illinois, I obtained access to work with the Gooch Synthetic Woodwind, or GSW, on the PLATO computer system.  This seemed like a fun opportunity and I took advantage of it.  The GSW was designed by Sherwin Gooch and it was a primitive four voice music synthesizer that used an ordinary square wave as its only timbre. The GSW was controlled by software on the PLATO system.  There was no keyboard.  You made noise by using or writing a simple computer program.

There was a music language code (later called OPAL) that you could use to describe music as a string of alphanumeric characters.  Then you would compile your music program code and the compiler would generate a music binary to control the GSW box.  All the music binaries were stored in the PLATO system and could be recalled easily.  The music department at the University of Illinois took advantage of this GSW system to write many music education programs.

So, once I got access, I started going over to Room 54 of CERL to work on PLATO in the large classroom.  I would check out a GSW and hook it up to the terminal and listen with headphones while I worked.  I learned the music programming language and started writing music.

One neat thing about the music code was it had a random function and I could use this to compose randomly organized music.  For some of the early songs, I wrote different measures of music and then used the random function to choose which measures would occur, and in what order, in the compiled version of the song.  I would sit and recompile the same song over and over to listen to different versions of the randomly organized music.

One coolest early early memories of the GSW is a PLATO program that would draw an animated line  segment connecting points on a circle.  As the program progressed the endpoints of the line moved around the circle and the line segment itself got longer.    At the same time the GSW box made some hyper-kinetic bleeping sound that was created from the graphic data of the line's end point positions.  This was a strange primitive sound like nothing you had ever heard before.  Not musical really, but engaging.

I remember one night in particular where a friend and I watched that program for two hours or more;  down in the PLATO lab in room 54 with both of us just sitting there with headphones staring at the flickering screen.

Strange.  That experience is really impossible to duplicate today, even IF you recreated a good simulation of the graphics and sound, because the context is entirely different today and cannot possibly be recreated.   Odd.    Like a parallel universe you can see into but cannot ever visit.

I do think about these events on occasion.  I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity and never thought that one day it would all be a distant and faint memory of an exceedingly primitive computer work environment.  I wish I could do it all over again.

Thanks to Sherwin Gooch and the rest of the PLATO system programmers for making it happen.

copyright (c) 2016

William Schaeffer