Born - November 14, 1939, Rhode Island, USA.

Wendy Carlos started piano lessons at age 6. She exhibited talents for graphic arts and the sciences, and won a Westinghouse Science-Fair scholarship for a home built computer. At Brown University her major was a hybrid of music & physics, encouraged by a professor who established the then-new field of bio-physics. Graduate school followed at Columbia University, where she took her M.A. in music composition with pioneers Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky at the first electronic music center in the United States. Carlos became a recording engineer in Manhattan, and made friends with Robert Moog, becoming one of his first clients, and Rachel Elkind, who was her producer and collaborator from 1968 through '80.

Carlos has written conventional works for ensembles as diverse as the Kronos Quartet, the London Philharmonic, and the Boston Symphony, and film scores for short subjects and full length features. However, during her long recording career, she has hardly followed a conventional music course. The hit recording, Switched-On Bach, the first classical album to go Platinum, propelled the Moog synthesizer into the public consciousness. After refining her techniques in The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, Carlos introduced the use of vocoders for synthesized singing in her score for Stanley Kubrick's film, A Clockwork Orange, long before space war movies made synthetic voices common. Her haunting Sonic Seasonings predated the now popular environmental-ambience forms of New Age music by over a decade.

Over the last three years, in collaboration with synthesist and friend Larry Fast, Carlos has developed a state-of-the-art digital process of soundtrack restoration and surround stereoization conversion called: Digi-Surround Stereo Sound. She is a continuing consultant and developer of new voice libraries and tuning tables for Kurzweil/Young Chang. Wendy Carlos has delivered keynote papers at New York University, the Audio Engineering Society's Digital Audio Conference and other music/audio conventions, and is a member of the AES, NARAS and SMPTE. She consults for several Macintosh developers including Coda, Mark of the Unicorn, Opcode and Altsys, and has designed and implemented two new PostScript music fonts for Casady & Greene.

Wendy Carlos currently lives in Greenwich Village, New York. Her hobbies include eclipse chasing, photography, drawing, astronomy, reading, gourmet food, film, and a love of animals.

Recordings

http://www.electronicmusic.com/datafiles/people/dossier/carlos.html