With the utilization of his Proportionate Sound and other LRH breakthroughs, the result proved most impressive. Indeed, wrote a critic of the day, L. Ron Hubbard solves "a problem the likes of Buddy Rich and even Woody Herman failed to do; that is, focus the energy of a combo in a big band, a feat which is like harnessing the atom."

      The next L. Ron Hubbard musical offering was likewise, both imaginative and unique--the first-ever musical soundtrack to a book, based on his international bestseller, Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000. Reflecting the mood of a futuristic Earth grown primitive following an alien assault, Battlefield Earth, the album, offers thirteen LRH compositions based upon significant events and characters from the novel. To best convey the sweep of the saga, the album utilized elements from several genres--from honky-tonk and free-swinging jazz to cutting-edge electronic rock. The result is a wholly new dimension in space opera sound, and what critics declared was a most "auspicious recording debut."


L. Ron Hubbard solved “a problem the likes of Buddy Rich and even Woody Herman failed to do; that is, focus the energy of combo in a big band, a feat which is like harnessing the atom.”

– Walrus Magazine
 

      To achieve what has, in all truth, only recently been approximated, Ron employed a then wholly unexplored device, the Computer Musical Instrument (CMI). Manufactured by Fairlight (which itself had not yet recognized the instrument's full potential), the CMI represented not a new form of synthesizer to replicate sounds, but a means of actually turning natural sounds into 13-note octaves, so that the natural sounds are the notes of the music. The howling wolves are singing the blues, the blast of guns are playing the rhythms and the alien voices are the horn solos. In other words, all manner of previously nonmusical sounds are suddenly "singing" the song and pounding out the rhythm.

      The point is significant, even if Ron had been only one of a very few to have recognized it at the time. For whereas the natural sound had long been employed as a musical gimmick--most memorably in the yapping dogs and honking geese used to punctuate the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band--it had never been integrated as music. In concise explanation, Ron wrote: "Computer music can incorporate natural sound into musical scales. A bear can growl two 13-note octaves. In a synthesizer it is not a bear growl--it is a synthesizer growl. There is a difference. Natural sound can then be combined with real (not synthesizer) instruments. Add to that the zing of real space opera music and you have a new era of music."

      The album, contains thirteen L. Ron Hubbard compositions, inspired by characters and significant events from his novel. The album further features a performance by jazz great Chick Corea. Yet even before final mixing, Ron had begun to conceive of another highly innovative musical statement--a progressive rock album based upon his 1984 "Analysis of Rock Music" wherein he delineated the fundamentals of the form in ways never previously recognized. The album itself was to constitute another soundtrack, in this case for his ten-volume grand satire, the Mission Earth series.




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