Published
Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 09:10
- The engineer and composer was 88.
The pioneering composer and engineer Peter Zinovieff has died.
Zinovieff was a trailblazer of computer music composition and synthesiser design. In the 1960s he used ad hoc, primitive equipment to develop methods of digital sound generation that were to become commonplace only decades later.
His company EMS, founded in 1969 with Tristram Cary and David Cockerell, was one of the earliest to sell synthesisers to the general public. Throughout the '70s, EMS released products like the VCS 3, Synthi A and Synthi AKS, which were used by everyone from Karlheinz Stockhausen to Kraftwerk and remain pinnacles of synthesis design to the present day.
Zinovieff had already been a member of Unit Delta Plus with BBC Radiophonic Workshop members Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, a group operating at the forefront of electronic music composition in the UK during the '60s. He also contributed to the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition of cybernetic art in 1968, designing a synthesiser that improvised melodies based on tunes whistled into a microphone.
Zinovieff returned to composition in the last decade, collaborating with Lucy Railton on RFG Inventions For Cello And Computer, which was released in 2020 by PAN. He'd also worked with poet Katrina Porteous and violinist Aisha Orazbayeva since 2010.
Watch a video about Zinovieff and EMS.