Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos, November 14, 1939) is an American musician and composer known for electronic music and film scores.
Born and raised in Rhode Island, Carlos studied physics and music at Brown University before moving to New York City in 1962 to study music composition at Columbia University. Studying and working with various electronic musicians and technicians at the city's Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, she helped in the development of the Moog synthesizer, Robert Moog's first commercially available keyboard instrument.
Carlos came to prominence with Switched-On Bach (1968), an album of music by Johann Sebastian Bach performed on a Moog synthesizer, which helped popularize its use in the 1970s and won her three Grammy Awards. Its commercial success led to several more albums, including further synthesized classical music adaptations, and experimental and ambient music. She composed the score to two Stanley Kubrick films, A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980), and for Tron (1982) for Walt Disney Productions.
In 1979, Carlos raised public awareness of transgender issues by disclosing she had been living as a woman since at least 1968, and in 1972 had undergone gender-affirming surgery.
, much of Carlos's discography is out of print, and has not been licensed for digital distribution to streaming or download platforms.
Early life Carlos was born on November 14, 1939 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to working-class parents Clarence and Mary Carlos. Her parents married in 1937,The "Index to Marriages in Massachusetts 1931-1935" states the year of marriage as 1931. and Carlos was the first of two children. Her mother played the piano and sang; one uncle played the trombone and another played the trumpet and drums. She began piano lessons at age six, and wrote her first composition, "A Trio for Clarinet, Accordion, and Piano", at age ten.
Carlos attended St. Raphael Academy, a Catholic high school in Pawtucket. In 1953, at fourteen, Carlos won a scholarship by building a computer presented at the Westinghouse Science Fair, a science competition for high-school students. From 1958 to 1962, Carlos studied at Brown University and graduated with a degree in music and physics, during which she taught informal lessons in electronic music.
Career
1960s In 1965, Carlos graduated from Columbia University with a master's degree in music composition, and assisted Leonard Bernstein in presenting an evening of electronic music at the Philharmonic Hall. Carlos studied with Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening, two pioneers of electronic music in the 1960s. They were based in the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City, the first of its kind in the United States. After Ussachevsky suggested to Carlos that she work in a recording studio to support herself, Carlos began working as a recording and mastering engineer at Gotham Recording Studios in New York City; she worked in this position until 1968. She called it "a really lovely occupation" and found it a useful learning experience.
During her time at Columbia, Carlos met Robert Moog at the 1964 Audio Engineering Society show, which began a partnership. Carlos ordered custom-designed synthesizer modules from Moog, and gave him extensive advice and technical assistance in the development of what became the Moog synthesizer, Moog's new electronic instrument. She convinced Moog to add a touch-sensitive keyboard for greater musical dynamics, among other improvements. Moog recounted that Carlos gave extensive and very detailed constructive criticism about his equipment, presenting him with suggestions for improvements to every module, including the shapes and dimensions of the cases. Moog credited Carlos with originating many features of his synthesizer, and that many features that became part of the final production model of the Moog synthesizer originated with the custom modules he created for her, including the touch-sensitive keyboard, a portamento control, a fixed filter bank, and a 49-oscillator polyphonic generator bank that could create chords and arpeggios.
By 1966 Carlos owned a small Moog synthesizer, which she used to record sound effects and jingles for television commercials, which earned her "anywhere from $100 to $1000". In 1967, Carlos met and befriended fellow Gotham Recorders employee Rachel Elkind, a former singer who had a jazz and musical theatre background and had worked as a secretary for Goddard Lieberson, then-president of Columbia Records. Although their initial meetings were somewhat confrontational (Elkind initially found Carlos "arrogant"), they eventually became friends and began sharing a home, studio, and business premises in a brownstone building in the West Side of Manhattan in New York City.
Carlos recorded several compositions in the 1960s as a student at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Two of them were re-recorded and released on By Request (1975), Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers (1963) and Episodes for Piano and Electronic Sound (1964), both featuring Phillip Ramey on piano. A third, Variations for Flute and Electronic Sounds (1964, featuring John Heiss on flute) was recorded and released in 1965 on a Turnabout Records "Electronic Music" compilation. Other known, but unreleased student compositions include "Episodes for Piano and Tape" (1964), "Pomposities for Narrator and Tape" (1965), and "Noah" (1965), a two-hour opera blending electronics with an orchestra. Carlos's first commercial release was Moog 900 Series – Electronic Music Systems (1967), an introduction to the technical aspects of the Moog synthesizer released as a nine-minute single-sided mono LP and narrated by Ed Stokes.
Part of her compensation for making the recording was in Moog equipment, and in part payment for her various other contributions to Moog's product development, and for articles she wrote for Moog's short-lived electronic music periodical, she was able to acquire additional Moog equipment at a discount, most of it custom-designed to her specific requirements. By the time Carlos began recording Switched-On Bach, she had built a home studio valued at around US$12,000 (approx. $111,000 in 2025) (although, given the unique nature of most of the modules, and their provenance, the 2025 value of her studio equipment would likely be far higher).
Her home studio, crucially, included an eight-track recorder that Carlos had built herself (because she was unable to afford a factory-made machine), using parts from Ampex and EMI recorders, with the addition of Ampex's patented "Sel-Sync" system, which enabled recorded signals to be monitored via the record head, rather than the playback head, thus permitting multiple tracks to be kept in perfect synchronisation. Carlos was also one of the earliest adopters of the Dolby noise reduction system, which she used for her final two-track masters.
Switched-On Bach In 1968, Carlos released Switched-On Bach, an album formed of several pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach performed on a Moog modular synthesizer. Carlos had originally wanted to record an album of her own music, but Elkind suggested that they use music that was more familiar to the general listener in order to introduce the synthesizer as a credible new instrument. The idea for an album of Bach's music performed on the Moog began to crystallize during 1967, after Carlos asked Elkind to listen to some recordings by Carlos and musicologist Benjamin Folkman made up to ten years prior at the Electronic Music Center, one of them being Bach's Two-Part Invention in F major, which Elkind took a liking to. Plans for an album of several Bach compositions developed from there.
From her experience working in the music industry, Elkind knew that a major label would be unlikely to accept a pitch from a woman, so she approached her friend, the musician, conductor and producer Ettore Stratta, who was then a producer working in the A&R division at Columbia Records. He successfully pitched the project to the label on their behalf, leading to a two-album recording contract with Columbia Masterworks, a deal that lasted until 1986. Crucially, it gave Carlos and Elkind ownership of their recording masters, and Elkind was able to negotiate what she described as "a very nice royalty", possibly because the label did not have to invest a large sum up-front and did not expect the album to sell many copies.
Columbia had launched an album sales campaign named "Bach to Rock", though it had no album of Bach's works in a contemporary context in its catalogue. They were given a small advance from the label; Elkind recalled they were offered $1000, Carlos told an interviewer they were given about $2500, a relatively modest sum, given that the average recording budget for a major pop album at this time was about $10,000. Columbia granted Carlos and Elkind artistic freedom to produce and release the album. Carlos performs with additional synthesizers played by Folkman and with Elkind as producer.
The recording process was long and complex, because the monophonic Moog could only play one note at a time. Due to the limitations of her equipment, every instrumental part in each score had to be recorded separately, and then each successive part was layered over the previously recorded parts on Carlos's eight-track recorder. All the parts were coordinated by recording each one in time with a click track, which was eventually erased. Biographer Amanda Sewell reports that Carlos only rarely wrote down the complex combination of control knob settings and cable connections (or "patches") used to create specific sounds on the Moog, and that she was able to memorize and recall nearly her entire "library" of patches at will.
This tortuous recording process was made even more difficult by the tendency of the early Moog oscillators to drift out of tune—by her own account, Carlos was often only able to record one or two measures of each part before the Moog went out of tune, and she claimed she sometimes even had to bang on the casing with a hammer to get it back into tune. This issue also meant that she had to meticulously review each segment for consistency once it had been recorded, because if one line was out of tune the entire section would be ruined.
Carlos later recalled that she worked on the recording of the album for eight hours a day, five days a week, for five months, on top of her regular full-time day job at Gotham Studios. Although Switched-On Bach was extremely costly in terms of person-hours expended, her high-quality home studio, her proficiency as a programmer and performer on the Moog, and her ability as a recording engineer enabled Carlos and her colleagues to record and produce the album completely independently, thereby avoiding the need to use expensive commercial recording studios. As well as the consideration that repeatedly taking the bulky, complex and delicate Moog system to and from a studio for each session would have been almost impossible, given Carlos's own reckoning that the project took over 1100 hours to complete, using commercial studios would have made the recording prohibitively expensive, and would likely have cost upwards of US$100,000 in 1968. By comparison, The Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band took over 700 hours to record and cost a reported UK£25,000, or about US$60,000 at the 1968 exchange rate. Additionally, although the recording was extremely labour-intensive, the combination of the Moog and the multitrack recorder gave Carlos and Elkind unprecedented control over every facet of the timbral, expressive and environmental qualities of every single note they recorded, enabling them to create a new level of clarity for each "voice" in the compositions—a key concern for Elkind, who was critical of what she called the "soggy" audio quality of contemporary classical recordings.