I always think it's strange when I find out about someone with one of those female/male name and/or gender changes. Like when I found out that Wendy Carlos, the winner of
three Grammy Awards for the 1969 album Switched-On Bach, used to be Walter Carlos. He had a sex-change operation in 1972 after 4 years of taking female hormones. They needed the money they got from the commercial success of Switched-On Bach to afford the "Bobbitt". She helped Robert Moog with the development of the Moog synthesizer, and was the person who first made them popular. She also wrote the scores to the movies A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Tron. She did Peter & the Wolf/Carnival of the Animals – Part II with "Weird Al" Yankovic, which was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Album for Children. I believe I mentioned before the album Beauty in the Beast where the entire album is synthesized, including the voices singing. "All the music and sounds heard on this recording were directly digitally generated. This eliminates all the limitations of microphones, the weak link necessary in nearly all other digital recordings, including those that use 'sampling' technologies." Her videos usually get taken down quickly leaving mostly tributes by unknowns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl4KIrMzb88&list=PLcR_76-3koxRnwQ5aPiaYiB2pTd1yxVe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCBwiM3notILarry Fast thanks Wendy Carlos for advice on at least one of his CDs. He made 11 albums under the name Synergy, was in progressive rock band Nektar, played synthesizers for Peter Gabriel on records and on tour, on a couple of Foreigner albums, on Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", and the list goes on. His first Synergy album, in 1975, Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra, was Number 66 on the Billboard 200 for 18 weeks. In 1976 Sequencer was Number 144 for 11 weeks, and in 1978 Cords was No 146 for 6 weeks. A lot of his stuff is on YouTube including full albums. Here's a song off each of the first 3 albums. I think Cords was the first one I ever heard. My older brother had it on a transparent LP. The song I posted from it goes farther from natural sounds than most of his stuff to that point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrFnSMxGKwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlnacE4bCnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9NxJ-euOFQ