Years ago, while working on an enormous story about the history of Detroit techno, I interviewed veteran area electronic music promoter Laura Gavoor. Gavoor, who passed away in 2000, was a force of nature. Chatty, charming, and given to impassioned verbiage regarding Detroit’s “spiritual sound,” she liked to describe electronic music as “really romantic” and “poetry without vocals.”

At the time, I didn’t see it -- or "hear it," as the case may be. I grew up in an era when electronic music meant one of three things: lumbering prog metal, laborious disco, or mind-numbing ‘80s Europop.

And synthesizers – was there a dirtier word than “synthesizer?” For us leather clad rock devotees, synthesizers and drum machines were the harbingers of doom. In this town, if you didn’t have a D.R.E.A.D. card in your wallet, then you were a pussy -- a synthesizer lovin’ pussy.

Suffice it to say that, as much as I liked Gavoor, I was a very hard sell. As the years wore on, however, I found her words ringing in my head. Repeated covering of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival opened my ears significantly and, with the news this week that British electronic music pioneer Tristram Cary passed away, I had what could best be called “an epiphany.”

Electronic music has always been emotional music -- very emotional music.

Cary, along with fellow BBC Radiophonic Workshop members Delia Derbyshire and composer Ron Grainer, must have known that from the start. Back in the ‘60s, all three were involved in creating music for the British sci-fi TV series Dr. Who. Derbyshire and Grainer came up with the famous "Dr. Who theme" -- an eerie conglomeration of a theramin-style electronic howl and rumbling rhythm keyboards – and Cary, known as the “father of tape music,” developed the jams that accompanied Dr. Who’s nemeses, the Daleks.

Ultimately, his tinkering led to the development of the EMS VCS3 – the first portable synthesizer, for which he created the visual design. A year later, American Bob Moog attached a keyboard to a similar contraption and the synthesizer, officially, was born. Soon, it would become as ubiquitous in popular music as bad haircuts.

The contribution of Cary (who died in his adopted home of Australia) and his colleagues cannot be underestimated though. As this awesome German TV show explains, they had to go through a lot of crude splicing, cutting, and taping to push music technology into the modern age.

And if you’re resistant to the idea of the synthesizer being an “emotional” instrument, take a listen to this snippet of Italian composer Armando Trovaioli’s “Kinky Peanuts” and try not to grin like a baboon.

It can’t be done.   

Wendy Case is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Arts & Entertainment.