There wasn’t yet a commercial market for digital audio products, but in labs, scientists were playing with the technology that would soon inform Agnello’s career. In a few years, he would personally be contributing to this heady evolution of recorded sound.Īgnello attended technical high school in Brooklyn, studied engineering at the City University of New York and then focused his graduate work on audio signal processing. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was “life-changing” for the young inventor. Released in June of 1967, the kaleidoscopic Sgt. A child of the ’60s, he was particularly enchanted by the Beatles, especially when the band’s studio techniques became more magical as they grew out their hair, started meditating and got into acid. “It is something totally different and new that allows you to do things that you simply couldn’t do before.”Īlways a tinkerer, Agnello grew up in New York participating in science fairs and immersing himself in music. “When a device like the Harmonizer is introduced, there really is no equivalent to it,” says Agnello. Eventide figured that a primary application would be for a singer to self-generate harmonies by changing the pitch of their own voice, so they called it the Harmonizer. As the world’s first digital effects unit, the Harmonizer also planted the flag for electronic production and the digital revolution that would ultimately make the machine obsolete. And that was only the beginning.Ĭombined with the machine’s delay and feedback tools, the Harmonizer created a new universe of far-out effects with which musicians could bend, shape and expand sound in ways never before possible.
By simply turning a knob, 30 seconds of electric guitar played in A minor could, for example, become 30 seconds of electric guitar played in C major. “It’s a no-brainer.”Īs the world’s first commercially available pitch-changing device, the H910 Harmonizer made it possible for artists to change the pitch of a sound without also changing its duration. “, ‘Wow, for equivalent of 10,000 dollars, I can run three more minutes of commercials every night and not have my audience go away because she’s screeching?’” says Eventide’s Tony Agnello, who invented the machine. A tidal wave of revenue hit Eventide headquarters, then located in Manhattan at 265 West 54th Street in the basement of the Sound Exchange recording studio. With this stroke of capitalist ingenuity, Eventide began shipping the enormously expensive pieces of equipment to television stations across the country. Lucile Ball was dashing around her apartment ten percent faster, but speaking in her same signature tone. The Harmonizer made it possible to lower these voices back to their normal human pitches while maintaining the higher speed at which the tape was being played. Affiliates were playing old episodes of I Love Lucy slightly faster to make time for the newly expanded advertising segments, but found that speeding up the tape made Lucy, Desi, Fred and Ethel’s voices obnoxiously cartoonish. Although the H910 Harmonizer – the newest machine from audio equipment manufacturer Eventide – was intended for use among musicians, in it local station managers saw a workaround to a vexing problem.
In the early ’70s, the FCC had loosened restrictions on how many commercials could be aired during television shows.
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For a machine capable of manipulating time itself, the Eventide Harmonizer’s origins in late-night TV reruns seem rather banal.