Leonard Rosenman

According to the following sources, Tom Oberheim made Rosenman an early prototype in 1969, which went on to be used for the Beneath the Planet of the Apes soundtrack and Linda Perhacs' "Parallelograms".

High Fidelity, April 1977

"So I built one, and this friend hooked it up to a piano and made some weird sounds with it; he thought it was terrific. Around the same time, I was building amplifiers and other little things for Don Ellis, the jazz musician, and he decided he wanted a ring modulator, too. Well, the word got around fast. In 1969, Leonard Rosenman, a film composer, heard about it and decided to use one in the score of Beneath the Planet of the Apes. He called me and I traipsed over to 20th Century-Fox for the recording. The funny thing was that some of the guys in that big orchestra listened to what was happening and said, 'Hey, I want a ring modulator, too.' So because of all these little unrelated incidents, I decided that maybe there was a market for these units.

Scram Magazine, January 2004

Kim: So the only one with an actual scroll was “Parallelograms.”

Linda: Because the music had to become pictures, and move. That song hasn’t been done right to this day. It still needs some of the equipment we have now. When I think computer graphics…I’ve even asked about pricing…I’ve been told that animation would be too expensive. I know Leonard would love to see this realized, too, because we only had one piece of equipment in the studio to do that song, and it was called a voice modulator. He was using it in his classical music.

Kim: Is that the same as a ring modulator?

Linda: Yeah. It modulates the voice. That’s the only thing we had in those days, but now you can do it with anything. It’s an idea before its time which hasn’t been done fully yet.

Fractured Air, October 23, 2014

Leonard was working in electronic sounds in his day at the time he is talking to me about this piece. He was using the only thing available to modulate the human voice and it was called a ring modulator. He was already attaching that to the sounds from a contralto; a beautiful woman contralto named Sally Cherry and he was using it in very avant garde classical pieces that were not meant for film or TV – it was his great passion to do these pieces of music – so he let me hear those sounds that day I saw this phenomenon in the sky. And I had already said to him “Leonard, we’ve got to use these sounds; I love it, what are you doing to that lady’s voice? It’s wild!” So Leonard was already using these sounds and then he would play some of the unusual tones and things in space movies when they assigned him to do a space movie.