On the night her album won three Grammys, Wendy Carlos performed in a man’s wig, glued-on sideburns, and pencil-drawn facial hair. This episode explores how a physicist and composer from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, who built a computer at 14 and earned degrees in both physics and music at Brown, co-developed the Moog synthesizer into a real instrument while hiding her gender transition from a hostile 1960s public.

The conversation covers her meeting with Robert Moog in 1964, her demands for a touch-sensitive keyboard and refined ADSR envelopes, and producer Rachel Elkind’s strategy of using Bach as a Trojan horse for electronic sound. It details the 1,100 hours of monophonic overdubbing behind Switched-On Bach, the fear that led her to contemplate suicide, her 1979 Playboy interviews, and the work that followed: A Clockwork Orange, Sonic Seasonings, The Shining score Kubrick discarded, Tron, the microtonal alpha, beta, and gamma scales of Beauty in the Beast, and a Weird Al parody of Peter and the Wolf.

• Why early Moog modules looked like telephone switchboards and lacked expressive control
• Building an eight-track recorder from spare parts because studio time would cost $100,000
• Hitting the synthesizer with a hammer to knock drifting oscillators back into tune
• The Faraday cage studio as both technical shield and psychological fortress
• Why nearly all of her catalog is out of print and absent from streaming services today