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January 2003 Meeting Notice
Dave Smith founded Sequential Circuits in the
mid-70s, and in 1977 he designed the Prophet-5, the world's first
microprocessor-based musical instrument and first fully programmable and
polyphonic synth. Dave is also generally known as the driving force behind
the generation of the MIDI specification in 1981. In 1987 he was named a Fellow
of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) for his continuing work in the area of
music synthesis. After Sequential, Dave was President of DSD, Inc, an R&D
division of Yamaha, where he worked on physical modeling synthesis and software
synthesizer concepts. He then started the Korg R&D group in California in
1989, which went on to produce the Wavestation synths and other technology.
Next, as President at Seer Systems he developed the world's first software based
synthesizer running on a PC. This synth, commissioned by Intel, was demonstrated
by Andy Grove in a Comdex keynote speech in 1994. Over 15 million of his
second-generation software synth have been sold, which was licensed to Creative
Labs in 1996. The third generation is the world's first first professional
software synthesizer, Reality, released in 1997. Dave has now returned to
hardware with the release of the Evolver synthesizer from his new company, Dave
Smith Instruments. |
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