The synthesis we almost made in 1965, and why we’re finally making it now.
In the 1960s, the technology existed:
Someone could have said: “What if my voice triggers logic gates? What if the tape stores not just audio but instructions? What if the recording studio is a programming environment?”
Nobody made the connection.
Instead, we went in two directions:
The engineers chased fidelity—clean signals, no tape hiss, perfect reproduction. The medium became invisible. Digital was “better” because you couldn’t hear it.
The artists chased nostalgia—warmth, saturation, “the sound of tape.” The medium became aesthetic. Analog was “better” because you could hear it.
Neither group asked: what if the medium is the program?
Imagine coding the tape with cues attached to your voice. Speaking triggers logic. The recording is the program.
You splice in a function. You dub over a variable. You mix down a module. The physical act of editing tape becomes the physical act of editing logic.
The output isn’t audio—it’s a reel that loads into the memory of a digital machine. Or any machine that can translate the tape into something else.
Voice → cue → tape → machine → execution.
The recording studio becomes a programming environment.
The synthesis wasn’t entirely missed. It happened—in music production.
Dave Smith invented MIDI in 1983. Before that, he built the Prophet-5 at Sequential Circuits—one of the first synths where you could store a sound configuration and recall it. The patch is the program.
With MIDI, the model became explicit:
And before MIDI, there was control voltage (CV). Voltage was the program. Change the voltage, change the sound. No abstraction layer.
The recording was the program. The studio was the development environment. Engineers were programming with patch cables and tape splices.
But it never crossed over. MIDI stayed in music. CV stayed in synthesis. Nobody said: “This is how all programming could work.”
We got hung up on quality.
Digital recordings sounded “fresh and sharp” because they didn’t have decades of mastering culture shaping them. Tape recordings sounded like the 60s—because the 60s defined what tape should sound like.
The taste became: make digital sound like analog. Or make analog sound pristine. Either way, the medium was a problem to solve, not a capability to exploit.
And underneath all of it: computers couldn’t understand meaning. They could only parse syntax. So general-purpose programming was forced into the text editor, the command line, the exact sequence of characters that the machine demanded.
The synthesis existed in a corner of music production—but it couldn’t generalize because the semantic layer didn’t exist.
Now it does.
With AI, we’re backing into exactly the model that could have existed:
The “tape” is the spec file. The “cues” are semantic anchors. The “playhead” is the AI reading the specification and generating implementation.
Change the spec, the implementation cascades. Just like cutting tape changed the sound.
We built it backwards—digital first, semantic layer on top—but we’re arriving at the same place. The medium is becoming the program again.
Tape era (1940s-70s): Direct manipulation. Cut tape → sound changes. Cause and effect visible.
Text era (1970s-2020s): Indirect manipulation. Write symbols → compiler magic → something happens. Cause and effect obscured.
Semantic era (2020s-): Direct manipulation returns. Write intent → AI interprets → implementation cascades. Cause and effect reunited.
The engineers who spliced tape had the right instinct. They just needed 50 years of compute to close the loop.
If we almost missed the voice-tape-logic synthesis in 1965, what are we almost missing today?
The pieces are lying around. Some obvious, some obscure. Waiting for someone to make a simple connection.
The lesson of the Logic Reel isn’t nostalgia for analog. It’s a reminder: the next synthesis might already be possible. The pieces might already exist. The connection might be simple.
Someone just has to make it.