TL;DR: A trans woman made the synthesizer happen 

Where would the community be without the synthesizer? Dance parties and drag brunches would be drrrry, that’s for sure. So, it might sound crazy that when the synthesizer was invented, it wasn’t immediately gagging the girls. To be fair, early versions were clunky. To make it sound good, your computer knowledge had to be on point, and tbh, a lot of people just weren’t ready to hear the future of music. 

These weird, electronic tones needed someone with vision, someone unafraid to go against the grain, someone a little more … queer to get middle America on board. So here’s the story of a badass queer person from history, Wendy Carlos, pioneerstress of the synthesizer and the first transgender woman to win a Grammy. 

Love moody synths? Thank this bitch 

Wendy Carlos was born and raised in Rhode Island, and studied physics and music at Brown University before getting her masters in music composition at Columbia. While working at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, Carlos contributed to the development of the first commercially available synthesizer with engineer Robert Moog.

After helping to invent it, Carlos wanted to show the world that the Moog synthesizer was more than a novelty, but a true, creatively viable instrument. 

“I thought what ought to be done was obvious, to use the new technology for appealing music you could really listen to,” Carlos said in a 1999 New Age Voice interview. “Why wasn't it being used for anything but the academy approved "ugly" music? You know, the more avant-garde than thou-ers, atonal, or formally tedious serial, twelve-tone straitjacket. My beloved field was decimated, turned into something quite hateful.” 

Over five months, Carlos and collaborator Benjamin Elkind put in over 1,000 hours into the 1968 album Switched-On Bach, which featured ten Johannes Bach pieces played on the synthesizer. 

The synthesizer creates sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and frequency modulation synthesis.

“To my knowledge, there were only three practitioners of the Moog synthesizer when I began,” Carlos remembered in a 1979 interview with Playboy. “People couldn’t even pronounce the word – synthesizer. I remember when we were putting together my Switched-On Bach album, some of the producers didn’t want us to use the word.” 

Switched-On Bach was a hit, reaching #10 on the Billboard chart and selling one million copies by June 1974. The album is credited with broadening people’s idea of what a synthesizer could do. As the decade progressed, synthesizers would come to be a major force in pop music, especially in the disco that was fueling the queer community’s vibes. Carlos does lose a *tad* bit of queer cred since she wasn’t down with disco. We’ll give her a pass though, since her objections were mostly due to lack of musical complexity. 

“If you’re asking me to name the hit disco singles, I can’t, since I generally flee from anything that repeats the same sequence more than 16 times,” she told Playboy. “I mean, if somebody wants to say ‘Once upon a time, once upon a time,’ I’ve got it after the fourth time.” 

Sounds like Carlos’ friends needed to take her to better parties (with better drugs). 

Why film bros know her 

In addition to her groundbreaking work with Switched-On Bach, Carlos made her mark in cinema by scoring Stanley Kubrik’s A Clockwork Orange and contributing to the soundtrack of The Shining. 

She also composed the score for the cult classic Disney science fiction movie Tron (1982), combining electronic music with acoustic orchestral recordings. 

Undercover  

Switched-On Bach won Carlos three Grammys in 1970, but although she had already started hormone replacement therapy at the time, she accepted the awards the same way she appeared at TV interviews: in male drag, fearful of reactions from the public and the industry. Over the next decade, she continued to work successfully as a composer under her birth name “Walter,” but did so under the radar, shunning media appearances as she lived her everyday life as a woman. Carlos recounted to Playboy her years in hiding, helped by her friend and roommate, Rachel:

“If someone called the house, Rachel would say ‘He’s in Providence, visiting with his family.’ Think of that one! What an ironic excuse to be giving. If I were within hearing distance, I’d quietly snort ‘Oh yes, he really loves Rhode Island and he’s very close to his parents.’ Or Rachel would say that this ubiquitous Walter Carlos was on tour, out of the country, anywhere, everywhere.” 

Beyond the burden that all of this secrecy had on Carlos’ mental health, it also affected her long term career goals. 

“The fact that I couldn’t perform publicly stifled me,” she said. “I was unable to communicate with other musicians. There was no feedback.”

Coming out in the most iconic way 

After nearly a decade in limbo, Carlos was ready to be open with the public about her gender transition, if only because she “hated the feeling of working as Walter Carlos.” She went to – where else? – Playboy in 1979 for a lengthy interview and spoke frankly about her inner life as a closeted trans woman, the medical side of hormone therapy and transition surgery, and the growing trans communities in New York City. 

Much of Carlos’ interview was dedicated strictly to her music, and she made it clear that she was speaking with such candor about her gender transition not as an activist, but as a woman who wanted to live and work as herself. She continues to make music and live a relatively private life, but her captivating Playboy interview remains a milestone in mainstream transgender visibility.