Ray Kurzweil will receive the 2015 Technical Grammy Award for his lifetime of work in the field of music technology.
The Technical Grammy Award is presented each year to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution of technical significance to the field of music recording.
Kurzweil is perhaps best known in the music world for Kurzweil Music Systems, the company he founded in 1982. KMS introduced the Kurzweil K250 in 1984 – the first computer-based instrument that could realistically recreate the sounds of a grand piano.
Many of Kurzweil’s early ’80s synthesizers were developed with the creative input of Stevie Wonder.
“I have been blessed to have known two people — Ray Kurzweil and Steve Jobs,” Stevie Wonder said, citing the contribution of both to enriching lives of others via technology.
Today, Kurzweil is the director of engineering at Google. As well as being a best-selling author and renowned futurist, Kurzweil is also regarded as the key innovator of text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition technology.
The Technical Grammy Award will be presented on February 8. [via Synthopia]
