Library Person
Ray Kurzweil
American inventor of the first print-to-speech reading machine, who went on to found Kurzweil Music Systems with Stevie Wonder.
Born in Queens, New York, in 1948, Ray Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products in 1974, developing the first omni-font optical character recognition software, the first CCD flatbed scanner, and the first text-to-speech synthesizer, combined into the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind, unveiled in 1976. Stevie Wonder heard of the machine on television and became an early customer; the two became friends, and in 1982 Wonder’s frustration with the limits of studio keyboards led Kurzweil to apply the reading machine’s underlying signal-processing work to music synthesis, founding Kurzweil Music Systems with Wonder that same year. Kurzweil later became widely known as a futurist and AI theorist, notably for The Singularity Is Near (2005), and holds a Director of Engineering role at Google.
Works in the Library
Ray Kurzweil, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Cichowlas ORGANIZATION
Synthesizer manufacturer founded by Ray Kurzweil and Stevie Wonder in 1982, whose K250 was the first instrument to convincingly sample acoustic piano.
COMPUTATION SOUND TECHNOLOGY