You won’t find him on wikipedia, but his work is woven into the music of Madonna, New Order, The Police and countless others. @beachboyz2men shares more about how Dan got his start, from creating telephone hold music to ending up working with Dr. Dre, helping to shape the sound of early hip-hop, and beyond…
"The Rhythmicon is universally regarded as the world’s first drum machine, but technically it’s not a “drum” machine. As opposed to other early devices, like the Chamberlin Rhythmate (introduced in 1957) or the Wurlitzer Sideman (1959), it doesn’t play beats according to typical time signatures. Instead it offers up a series of complex rhythmic pulses, each playing at a different pitch and each corresponding to different ratios from the harmonic series.
Cowell, who was born in 1897 and died in 1965, is probably best known for composing with “tone clusters” – chords built out of adjacent notes that he’d play on the piano with his fist or forearm. But he commissioned Theremin to build the Rhythmicon because he was hoping to bring to life another radical idea he’d been working on throughout the 1920s: Taking the infinite multiples of a fundamental wavelength (for example, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, and so on) and transposing them into beats. ..." By Peter Holslin on June 17, 2015