John Chowning - Stria (1977)

There is a tendency to judge and predict the commercial success of this (and every) music project. As a long-time player and designer of digital music instruments in academic laboratory and underground contexts, i can say it's almost impossible to produce a hit directly from a laboratory. It has to go through a commercial layer first. Then an artistic layer. That's not a dig at anyone or anything. Music is a projection of life's experiences into sound... A lab can inject some tech into the music world, but we won't know for approximately 1-2 decades whether any instrument or technique is a hit or it. FM Synthesis, formalized by Chowning at Stanford ,comes to mind. His initial implementations were idiosyncratic. His math was an organization of community knowledge. It took Yamaha's need to make sound cards and keyboards to direct all this effort those sounds into the chips and instruments we ended up buying and loving in the 80s. And it took artists and producers to bring out the best of the techniques. Also, you'll find when the tech passes through the artistic layer, there are many more mundane variables than the technology, such as re-sale value and ability to get them re-paired. For example, if you think these sounds are non-compelling, I dare you to look up compositions by Chowning himself! [1] They are nothing like Samantha Fox's "Touch Me," [2] a famous example of the Yamaha DX-7 FM synthesizer. The point of research like this is not really to inspire music fans so much