Alan R. Pearlman—the founder of ARP Instruments, the synthesizer company best known for analog instruments that helped shape the sounds music and film throughout the 1970s—has died, as the New York Times reports. He passed away on January 5. He was 93 years old.
Born in 1925, Pearlman briefly served in the U.S. Army before attending Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he developed a “vacuum-tube envelope follower” that could adjust the attack and decay of an instrument’s sound. He would stray from music technology development and instead work in electrical engineering fields. The 1960s saw him working on the Gemini and Apollo rocket programs for NASA before founding ARP (originally called Tonus Inc.) in 1969.
ARP’s most beloved synthesizers include the ARP Odyssey and ARP 2600, used by artists and bands such as ABBA, Stevie Wonder, Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Herbie Hancock, Nine Inch Nails, DEVO, Chemical Brothers, Orbital, Joy Division, and countless others. The Odyssey and 2600 were also integral to beloved sounds and music found in science-fiction works such as “Doctor Who” and Star Wars. While the company folded at the beginning of the 1980s after declaring bankruptcy, the legacy of ARP synthesizers has endured. Emulations of ARP instruments continue to be developed and released by software companies to this day.
