“It’s a no-brainer.”Īs the world’s first commercially available pitch-changing device, the H910 Harmonizer made it possible for artists to change the pitch of a sound without also changing its duration.
“, ‘Wow, for equivalent of 10,000 dollars, I can run three more minutes of commercials every night and not have my audience go away because she’s screeching?’” says Eventide’s Tony Agnello, who invented the machine. A tidal wave of revenue hit Eventide headquarters, then located in Manhattan at 265 West 54th Street in the basement of the Sound Exchange recording studio. With this stroke of capitalist ingenuity, Eventide began shipping the enormously expensive pieces of equipment to television stations across the country. Lucile Ball was dashing around her apartment ten percent faster, but speaking in her same signature tone. The Harmonizer made it possible to lower these voices back to their normal human pitches while maintaining the higher speed at which the tape was being played. Affiliates were playing old episodes of I Love Lucy slightly faster to make time for the newly expanded advertising segments, but found that speeding up the tape made Lucy, Desi, Fred and Ethel’s voices obnoxiously cartoonish. Although the H910 Harmonizer – the newest machine from audio equipment manufacturer Eventide – was intended for use among musicians, in it local station managers saw a workaround to a vexing problem. In the early ’70s, the FCC had loosened restrictions on how many commercials could be aired during television shows. For a machine capable of manipulating time itself, the Eventide Harmonizer’s origins in late-night TV reruns seem rather banal.
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