John Chowning

John Chowning is an American composer and acoustician, born August 22, 1934, in Salem, New Jersey, best known for developing a digital implementation of frequency modulation (FM) synthesis. He created the FM synthesis algorithm in 1967 while at Stanford University, where one audio wave modulates the frequency of another to produce a resultant sound; Stanford licensed the discovery to Yamaha in 1974, and FM synthesis powered the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer that became central to 1980s popular music production. Chowning also developed sound spatialization algorithms between 1962 and 1972, creating the illusion of a continuous 360-degree quadraphonic sound space in his 1972 composition Turenas. He earned a Bachelor of Music from Wittenberg University in 1959, studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and received his Doctor of Musical Arts from Stanford in 1966, where he became founding director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) in 1975.