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The Music Director

May, 1969

Moog Synthesizer Is Heart Of JU Electronic Music Studio

As of January 1969, Jacksonville University has formally opened its new Electronic Music studio, thus bringing to fruition plans which in some cases were laid down as long as eight years ago.
It was in 1961 that Prof. William Hoskins, composer-in-residence, circulated a memorandum suggesting that JU establish a "laboratory of experimental music" for research related to the teaching of ear-training, and for the study of microtones. Had the university been in a position to act at that time, the result would no doubt have been the establishment of a "classical" electronic music studio with laboratory-style audio oscillators and filters, an elaborately tunable electronic organ, and assorted recording and amplifying equipment.
Much can be accomplished in such a studio: but it operates on a "stop-and-splice" basis, in which the yard-stick (for measuring off lengths of recording tape) becomes an indispensable composing tool!

Delay was fortunate in this case, because it allowed a young genius named Robert A. Moog to complete, and to make available commercially and inexpensively, a series of modular instruments designed for the composition of electronic music. The majority of these instruments are voltage-controlled, and the control voltage signal may originate among other sources, in a very conventional-looking keyboard- as well as in a sliding potentiometer, a telegraph key- or in any other gadget which can supply a small arid accurately measured direct current voltage.
The Moog Synthesizer which became the heart at the JU electronic music studio has four oscillators under a single controller; these operate together at any audio or sub-audio frequency from 20 KHz. to one cycle every three seconds. Each of them gives four wave-forms: sine, triangular, sawtooth, and a pulse output in which the width of the pulse may be controlled by a dial.

There are also two independent Oscillators with their own control sections, with the same output capabilities; a white-sound source which will also give "pink" (bass-heavy) sound; a "formant" filter with dial control over the central half-octave wave-bands; an active filter with cutoff poinl controllable via the keyboard; two envelope generators to control the starting and stopping of tones; a reverberation unit, and three panel mixers. This array permits the synthesis of relatively long spans of music without interruption.

The Synthesizer feeds a four-track tape recorder on which previously recorded tracks may be played back while new ones are added. A small but complete junction panel, built by Prof. Hoskins, allows this recorder to be connected to two others for copying, mixing, and special effects.
The versatility of the new equipment was put to a stern test even before the studio was formally opened, when Prof. Hoskins had to synthesize a complete, and for the most part traditional-sounding, score of incidental music for an on-campus production of "Peer Gynt". This was accomplished successfully in a total work time of only 10 days, from the first written note to the final edited tape- for well over an hour's worth of music.
There would have been no more traditional medium which could have come so far in so short a time; and yet this score tapped only a tiny portion of the thousands of sounds, most of them new, which the Synthesizer is capable of creating.

Now that the studio is formally open, the first student compositions have started to appear. Lecture-demonstrations have averaged nearly one a week, for groups ranging in size from a half-dozen to 200; the Synthesizer has made two Jacksonville television appearances. Faculty members have requested live/synthesized compositions featuring their instruments or voices; a new ballet for the JU Dance Theatre, using stereo tape tracks and live voices, is in progress. And research has begun on interval material found in quarter-tone and seventeen-tone scales.
A new science and a new art, but not a replacement for the older ways of making music!