In 1970, it won Grammy Awards for Best Classical Album, Best Classical Performance – Instrumental Soloist or Soloists (With or Without Orchestra), and Best Engineered Classical Recording. By June 1974, it had sold over one million copies, and in 1986 became the second classical album to be certified platinum. Switched-On Bach reached number 10 on the US Billboard 200 chart and topped the Billboard Classical Albums chart from 1969 to 1972. It played a key role in bringing synthesizers to popular music, which had until then been mostly used in experimental music.
Produced by Carlos and Rachel Elkind, the album is a collection of pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach performed by Carlos and Benjamin Folkman on a Moog synthesizer. This more approachable material lets the author delve into serious number theory (concentrating on the ramifications of Gödel's Theorem of Incompleteness) while stopping along the way to ponder the work of a host of other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers.Switched-On Bach is the debut album by American composer Wendy Carlos, originally released under her birth name Walter Carlos in October 1968 by Columbia Records. Allusions to Bach's music (centering on his Musical Offering) and Escher's continually paradoxical artwork are plentiful here. Borrowing a page from Lewis Carroll (who might well have been a fan of this book), each chapter presents a dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles, as well as other characters who dramatize concepts discussed later in more detail. Hofstadter's great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bach was making abstruse mathematical topics (like undecidability, recursion, and 'strange loops') accessible and remarkably entertaining. For the general reader and the computer techie alike, this book still sets a standard for thinking about the future of computers and their relation to the way we think. It also looks at the prospects for computers and artificial intelligence (AI) for mimicking human thought. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (PDF) is still a miracle today, although it has been on the bestseller list for more than 20 years. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel.
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