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Daily Orange

April 22, 1969
Electronic Moog music to become the mood music of the future
By SUE SHAPIRO

The swinging cats of the music world have turned on to what may be the hottest, craziest new vogue in music since ragtime- the Electronic Sound.
The Sound is a bunch of wild buzzes, squeaks, crackles and hisses produced by a bizarre looking machine called the Moog Synthesizer. The Moog, an ingenious contraption of transistors, wires, generators, filters, oscillators, circuits and knobs hooked onto what resembles an organ keyboard, has revolutionized contemporary music.

SU has a baby Moog up in room 407 or Crouse College. The synthesizer is the basic piece of equipment in the university's electronic studio.

Installed in 1966. the studio was one of the first in the country, and it is today one of the most complex, sophisticated sound laboratories on any college campus.
According to Richard Burns, Crouse audio engineer, very few universities have invested in such a large, expert system or have a formal program in electronic music.
The mechanical brainchild of Robert Moog, 34, an engineering physics Ph.D. from Cornell, the machine can create an infinite number of variations of a single sound.
The keyboard generates sounds of all descriptions which are amplified, filtered, and modified by varying volume, speed, rate of attack and decay. an by adding artificial reverberation to create echo or vibrato effects.

Sensational sound qualities are manufactured by filtering sounds into narrow bands on the Moog two tape channel and then combine them.
The next step in avant-garde music-making is to put the Moog to work with a computer. Compositions will be coded on punch cards and the computer will be programmed to manipulate the sound controls Dr. Franklin E. Morris director or the Crouse Electronic Studio, argues against claims that all this electronic hocus-pocus and technical wizardy will impersonalize music.

"We should think of the synthesizer as just another instrument It doesn't
dehumanize music any more than the piano does," he says.
The most spectacular thing about the Moog, Morris says, is that theoretically it can make any Sound at all whereas the traditional instruments have very limited sounds.
Actually, electronic music has been around for the past 15 years But not until Columbia Records put out an LP called "Switched-On Bach," did the world tune in on the most astounding musical break-tkrough in years.
Beatles and the Rolling Stones put in orders for the Moog; and the era of electronic music blasted into being.

"I think it would dumbfound Bach as well as Mr Moog to now that it took a record of synthesised Bach to win popular recognition of electronic music" Morris said.
The 11 students in the electronic music program here are not concerned with transcribing classical compositions like Bach into synthesized sound. Their work is largely experimental, involving original electronic compositions and instruction in the nature of sound.

The phenomenon of mixed media is a byproduct of the Moog mode of music. The SU electronic studio has staged several concerts mixing together sound, visual effects, dance and theatrics. Collaborations of media are becoming more and more widespread, having been used by Warhol, dancer Merce Cunningham and scores of theatre groups.

Morris thinks mixed media was the result of the feeling that taped, synthesized Moog music was "too dull" for an audience. "An audience likes to see people perform on the stage," be explained.

Mixed media shows in which the music is used in conjunction with a live performance, have been highly successful.
Morris firmly believes that the modern Moog which costs no more than a Steinway grand piano will someday become as common an instrument as the piano.
"They 'II put the synthesizer in an Italian Provincial case," he said, and in 25 years you'll be able to buy it in Sears Roebuck".