When Wonder heard about Kurzweil’s Reading Machine, he visited Kurzweil (pictured above) in person and, according to CNBC, became the company’s first official customer. The two men became friends and in 1982, they collaborated on a project meant to combine what Kurzweil called “the two worlds of musical instruments” — the analog “nineteenth century acoustic instruments such as the piano, guitar and violin” and digital “computerized world of instruments, which could remember what you played and allowed the musician to edit a multi-instrumental piece the way a user could edit a document on a word processor.” 

Wonder challenged Kurzweil to create a new kind of instrument that would incorporate the former’s rich sounds with the latter’s ability to control, reuse, and remix sounds as needed. They formed their own company and spent the next several years working together, with Wonder acting as music advisor while Kurzweil tinkered with building and testing the instrument. The result was the Kurzweil 250, released in 1984 and described by CNBC as “widely considered the first computerized instrument that could realistically mimic the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.”

Kurzweil sold Kurzweil Music Systems to a Korean company in 1990. His original Reading Machine is now available as an app to anyone with a smartphone. Kurzweil went on to be a director of engineering at Google, where he remains today. He also runs the Kurzweil Library on his personal website, which “catalogs the quickening growth of tech, knowledge, and concepts shaping tomorrow.”