Electronic Sound Logos, 1959-1989 A Literature Review Alex Temple Qualifying Exam Paper No. 3 10.21.13 1 1. The S From Hell Growing up in the late 1960s, Chris McGovern was terrified to the point of having nightmares by the animated logo of the Screen Gems production company, which appeared at the end of his favorite TV shows. Only years later did he discover that a whole generation had been frightened by animated TV logos. They came together online, posting video compilations of the ones they found especially scary — and they often picked the Screen Gems logo as one of the worst. It wasn’t just the stark, minimalist visual design that made it so disturbing; it was also the “creepy” music, a 13-note note synthesizer fanfare composed by Eric Siday (“Good To Know It Wasn’t Just Me”). In 2012, McGovern interviewed Rodney Ascher, the director of a short documentary about the logo called The S From Hell. Ascher was also frightened by it when he was young, and the language that he now uses to describe it emphasizes the alienating nature of the synthesizer’s sound: “cold,” “robotic,” “futuristic,” like “music played at a Martian funeral” (“Rodney Ascher on The S from Hell”). Similar language appears on the film’s website, which refers to the “mournful, dissonant sounds that hid in the cracks between ... TV shows.” McGovern himself calls the music “other-worldly.” And he notes that Eric Siday’s “whole story has yet to be told” (“Rodney Ascher on The S From Hell”). Siday, in fact, is only one figure in a larger story: that of the electronic sound logo. It begins with Raymond Scott, a former jazz bandleader and electronic-instrument inventor who was also responsible for some of the first commercials to use only electronic music (Winner 185), and who coined the term “audio logo” in the late 1950s (Blom and Winner 111, 139). The story continues with Siday himself, who was also a jazz musician before turning to advertising. In the mid-1960s, Siday turned Scott’s idea into a successful business, using a Moog synthesizer 2 (Brend 109) where Scott had used a battery of eccentric devices that he created himself (Winner), formalizing the concept of the sound logo (“Audio Logos” 36), and eventually becoming “one of the best-paid and most widely heard composers in the world” (Brend 108-9). After Siday’s death in 1976, he was succeeded by Suzanne Ciani, a composer who had studied electronic music at Berkeley and Stanford (Tonlay “Ciani ‘Electrifies’” 30). By the early 1980s, Ciani was considered “one of the commercial industry’s leading composer/performer/ arranger/producers” (“Ciani Makes New Waves” 54); Pinch and Trocco refer to her as “the Eric Siday of her generation” (164). It was during her career that the electronic sound logo truly entered the mainstream. In the 1970s, she says, “[n]obody understood electronic music” (Richards); by the end of the 1980s, she was remarking to Back Stage magazine that “[e]veryone [in advertising] uses a synth now” (Comer “Ciani Musica’s Organic Evolution” 5). In Fortner’s words, “Suzanne Ciani made sure you heard the sound of the synthesizer in your living room.” Although the individual pieces of this story are fairly well documented, it is only in the last few years that scholars have begun to piece them together into a coherent narrative. Many books and articles that one would expect to discuss the history of the electronic sound logo ignore it entirely. This paper begins with a discussion of that neglect and its possible causes. It then reviews the resources that are available to someone researching the commercial work of Scott, Siday and Ciani — both the relatively scant academic literature, and the larger body of primary-source material from newspapers, magazines, and non-print media. Finally, it concludes with a brief discussion of the literature on less influential sound-logo composers. 3 2. There’s a Whole Tradition Here That’s Being Ignored Our problems begin with terminology. Although the brief electronic flourishes that Scott and Siday introduced to advertising are most often called “sound logos” or “audio logos,” there are a plethora of other terms in use, including “logotones” (Georgopoulos 28), “emblems” (Graakjær and Jantzen 33), “sogos” (Palghat iii), “audio tags” and “commercial themes” (Richards), “electronic jingles” and “sound signatures” (Pinch and Trocco 56), “sonic brand signatures” (Kiley), and “audio signatures,” “audio watermarks,” and “sound-marks” (Bigge). Worse, when writers use multiple terms in a row, they rarely elaborate on the differences between them; Pinch and Trocco, for example, never explain how an “electronic jingle” differs from a “sound signature.” For the purposes of this paper, we use Eric Siday’s definition of “sound logo”: a few seconds of sound, without words, designed for use in radio and TV commercials, and often intended to complement a company’s visual logo (“Audio Logos” 34). A sound logo is distinct from a jingle, which is longer and has lyrics; Siday’s promotional material emphasizes this distinction with lines like, “Radio stations interested in shedding thinly-worn jingle images now can try something new in logos” (“Identitone’s I.D.’s”). Modern writers on advertising tend to maintain this distinction, even if they use different terminology. Graakjær and Jantzen, for example, define an “emblem” as a “short-lived musical sound ... synchronized with [visual] logo presentation” (65), only a few seconds long (33) and consisting of only one “museme,” or unit of musical meaning (66). Likewise, Smillie refers to “two- to five-tone audio logos” that you “hear at the end of a commercial, usually when the company’s [visual] logo pops onto the screen.” As an example, he names Walter Werzowa’s five-note, wordless logo for Intel. Strangely, though, the same writers typically present the 4 sound logo as a recent development. Smillie, writing in 2000, makes reference to their “increasing popularity” and gives only contemporary examples, while Graakjær and Jantzen, writing in 2009, refer to the “apparently recent advent of emblems in in TV commercials” (66) and include a chart suggesting that they became popular in the 1990s (67). A 2007 article in Brand Strategy calls sound “the last great unexplored territory for the marketing profession” (“Aural Advertising”), and even Daniel Jackson’s Sonic Branding: An Introduction — a book written by a sound-logo composer that includes a chapter called “A Historical Perspective” (51-3) makes no mention of Scott, Siday or Ciani. One might expect to see more about sound logos in books on electronic music, especially since the three major sound-logo composers played important roles in the development of the synthesizer. Scott was responsible for such devices as the Orchestra Machine, an early ancestor of the Mellotron (Irwin and Chusid 99), and the Electronium, an “instantaneous composition/performance machine” (Irwin and Chusid 102). Ciani worked for Donald Buchla (Milano “Suzanne Ciani” 33), and later helped popularize his instruments (Fortner). Siday was Robert Moog’s second customer (Chadabe 142). But until recently, histories of electronic music have focused primarily on the avant-garde — sometimes with a chapter devoted to electronics in rock and pop music, but nothing about music written for commercials. We see this pattern, for example, in Elliott Schwartz’s Electronic Music: A Listener’s Guide, Paul Griffiths’s A Guide to Electronic Music, and the 1987 edition of Peter Manning’s Electronic and Computer Music. Even books that are more focused on the obscure recesses of popular culture — such as Peter Shapiro’s Modulations, which discusses experimental bands such as Faust and Throbbing Gristle — ignore the world of commercials. Why such a pattern of neglect? In writings on advertising, it may result from the profession’s focus on constant innovation and its tendency to dismiss the techniques of the past 5 as naive. For some authors, the sound logo has been subsumed into the broader category of sonic branding, and the way marketers conceive of branding in general has changed so much since the era of Scott, Siday and Ciani that, from a business point of view, calling their approach naive might actually be justified. Starting in the early 1990s, many large corporations have shifted their focus from marketing a product to marketing “a way of life, a set of values, a look, an idea” (Klein 23). It is this sort of branding that “Aural Advertising” has in mind when it refers to sound as an “unexplored territory”; the article describes a brand as “both a promise and an experience,” and the first example it gives is the music played in Starbucks, not the Intel logo (and certainly not the Screen Gems logo). Among scholars of music, advertising music has traditionally been regarded as trivial, if not suspect. This is nowhere clearer than in the 2013 edition of Manning’s Electronic and Computer Music. Unlike in the 1987 edition, Manning does acknowledge the role of “electronic jingles and related sound effects” in familiarizing the public with synthesizers — but he accuses them of “debas[ing] such sources to the level of an advertising aid” (168), and does not deign to mention any composers of such “ephemera” by name. Advocates for sound-logo composers have often commented on this tendency among academics: Georgopoulos, while interviewing Ciani, mentions that “[a]dvertising music, jingles, et cetera, are typically written off by the higher brow” (31), and Rhea, while discussing Raymond Scott, remarks that “the academic canon ... just don’t really care about anything except the personalities they have decided are pioneers... [T]here’s a whole tradition here that’s being ignored” (89).