In 1968, Wendy Carlos took a Moog synthesizer, an unknown instrument at the time, and electronically reconstructed Johann Sebastian Bach's "Brandenburg Concerto No. 3," among other pieces, into the world's first-ever platinum-selling classical album, "Switched on Bach." The record became the most influential "electronic" classical recording of all time, smashing the borders between classical and synthesized music. It won her three Grammys and sent a message to the world that a synthesizer was a musical instrument, rather than just an obscure machine used by professors in labs to make weird robot sounds.

" The early electronic instrumentation was not of a kind that allowed you do the literal-minded sampling of every instrumental note to try to assemble later. That became too much like pasted clip art. You ' d have to take a sample, say, of every way that a head can face, and all the expressions, the hand motions, and then try to create real art from pieces.__" Carlos muses about her earlier creative processes in a 2007 interview with Frank J. Oteri.

Carlos was born in a working-class family in Pawtucket, R.I., and started piano lessons at age six. She went on to study music and physics at Brown University and music composition with pioneers Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, the first electronic music center in the U.S.A. She started working as a tape editor at Gotham Recording and struck up a friendship with Robert Moog, the inventor of the Moog synthesizer, consequently becoming one of his first clients.