Belar, Herbert, 1901-1997

Herbert Belar was born on March 5, 1901. He was a research fellow at the Radio Corporation of America's David Sarnoff Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., where, with his superior Harry F. Olson, he developed the first music synthesizers. Belar retired to Florida, where he died on December 7, 1997.

With RCA's huge investment in recorded and broadcast music, the company's engineers were quick to grasp the importance of Claude E. Shannon's groundbreaking 1948 paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communications," the foundation stone of modern information theory. On May 11, 1950, Olson and Belar issued their first internal research report, "Preliminary Investigation of Modern Communication Theories Applied to Records and Music," in which they proposed to consider music mathematically as information and thus be able to generate music mathematically instead of from traditional instruments. On February 26, 1952, Olson and Belar demonstrated their first experimental model for David Sarnoff and other company officials, having it perform renditions of "Home Sweet Home" and "Blue Skies."

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