Alan R. Pearlman: Portrait of an Inventor

Before ARP: A Short Biography of the Long Life of Alan R. Pearlman

Alan Pearlman was destined to be an engineer since the day he was born. His father designed movie theater projectors and his grandfather made parts for phonograph machines. A fascination with sound occupied his interest from an early age. (Hayim Kobi)

As a child he built amateur radios and in 1948, as a student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he wrote a paper on electronic music in which he said: “The electronic instrument’s value is chiefly as a novelty. With greater attention on the part of the engineer to the needs of the musician, the day may not be too remote when the electronic instrument may take its place as a versatile, powerful, and expressive instrument.” (Hayim Kobi)

In 1969, after spending the first part of his career developing amplifiers for purposes unrelated to the music industry, he heard Wendy Carlos’ Switched on Bach, the influential album that overdubbed multiple tracks played on a Moog synthesizer. He decided to design his own electronic instrument and started a new company. He christened it Tonus and later changed it to ARP, his childhood nickname (after Alan R. Pearlman). (Hayim Kobi)

To learn more about synths, Alan consulted with a friend who used Moogs in the Electronic Music Lab at Brown University and Harvard University composer Leon Kirchner, who used Buchlas. (Mark Vail)

We came to the conclusion,” Alan told me in 2000, “that neither of those systems was particularly stable for frequency. It wouldn’t be a very good musical instrument unless it stayed in tune.” (Mark Vail)

Thus was born the ARP 2500. If you don’t recall it, a version played a prominent roll in the “making-contact” scene of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when aliens in the mothership exchanged the familiar five-note motif with musician Jean Claude at a huge synthesizer console. The character was played by Philip Dodds (b. 5/17/1951, d. 10/6/07), vice president of engineering at ARP. (Mark Vail)

Although he did some consulting with companies that wanted to recreate his synths ten years later, Alan told me (Mark Vail) in April 2000 that he didn’t miss making synthesizers because he kept busy developing “other electronic things.” (Mark Vail)

That included renewable-energy technology. “I suspect that using fuel cells and metal hydrides instead of liquid hydrogen or regressive hydrogen are going to be playing a role in the industrial world,” he said in early 2006. “Right now it isn’t clear to anybody exactly what’s going to be, but companies are already manufacturing hydride systems, and some of them are extremely interesting to me.” (Mark Vail)