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Bell Labs has been a major force in audio technology since it was founded in 1925 as a joint venture between AT&T and Western Electric. As long ago as 1933, Bell Labs transmitted the first live stereo audio signals. In 1937, its vocoder became the first electronic speech synthesizer. A decade later, Bell Labs’ scientists created the transistor, and a decade after that, it developed MUSIC — one of the first computer programs to play electronic music — and helped begin a revolution in how music was created.
On an even more fundamental level, Bell Labs’ research enabled the music industry to transition from the acoustic-based recording technology in which cumbersome cones were used to channel musical energy, to an electrical-based model, whereby the fluctuation of an electrical signal recorded the audio. Thanks to critical research by Bell Labs, the first electrical recording — of the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski — was made in 1925. Electrically based recording had its foundations in work done by Western Electric’s researchers, including the development of the condenser microphone in 1916, the refinement of loudspeaker technologies that saw the first modern public address system used in 1921, and the “light valve” that in 1923 laid the foundation for the optical soundtrack for film.
Today, Bell Labs is a division of Lucent Technologies, an heir to the AT&T and Western Electric legacies, and is based in Murray Hill, N.J. Over the last 80 years, Bell Labs’ technologists have been awarded six Nobel Prizes in Physics, while also earning more than 30,000 patents. Thanks to Bell Labs, sound has never been better.
“There is no one who better epitomizes the ideal marriage of technical excellence and true creativity,” Atlantic Records’ founder Ahmet Ertegun said of his longtime friend and colleague Tom Dowd in 1999. Dowd’s creative work with a wide range of jazz, R&B and rock acts resulted in his being voted a GRAMMY Trustees Award in 2002. This year, he has been awarded a Technical GRAMMY, specifically in recognition of his technical innovations. Dowd is only the fourth person to be granted both of these honors, following fellow engineer-turned-producer Phil Ramone, guitar and multitracking pioneer Les Paul and synthesizer innovator Robert Moog.
Dowd, who had majored in physics at Columbia University, began his career as a freelance engineer in New York in the late 1940s. “We were still in the Stone Age when it came to recording,” he told Mix magazine’s Blair Jackson in a 1999 interview. Originally working direct-to-disc, Dowd introduced Atlantic to stereo recording in 1952. Two years later, he joined the label as staff engineer and in-house technical guru. He designed Atlantic’s pioneering 8-track studio in the late ’50s. He also designed and built consoles and other equipment, and developed miking concepts that are still used today.
Dowd segued into production work in the late ’60s. He remained active until shortly before his death, at 77, in October 2002. The following year, filmmaker Mark Moormann premiered his acclaimed documentary, Tom Dowd & The Language Of Music. That was a language Dowd understood like few others.
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