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“If I were more talented or braver, for that matter, I might have become a musician instead,” he says.Īs Eventide’s first engineer, he invented the H910 Harmonizer, which could alter sounds from instruments as they were being recorded in the studio.
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“If not for Richard and I, someone else would have done it.”Īgnello came from a musical household, and knew he wanted to somehow combine music and technology. When The Institute asked Agnello what the recognition means to him, he joked, “It means that I’m old.” He says he was fortunate because the timing was right. The Grammy Awards, presented by the Recording Academy, recognize achievement in the music industry. Their work is being recognized with this year’s Lifetime Achievement Technical Grammy Award, to be awarded in June. During the course of four decades, they developed digital audio devices for recording, broadcasting, and film. That day he met one of the company’s founders, Richard Factor, and they began what would become a lifelong partnership. It was 1972 and he was looking for a job.Īgnello was pursuing a master’s degree at the City University of New York, where he was studying digital signal processing at a time when music was produced by-and recorded exclusively on-analog equipment. Anthony Agnello was 23 years old when he stepped inside the basement that was then the office of Eventide-an audio hardware company just starting out in New York City.
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