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AP News features writer

September 27, 1969
It's Called Moog It Plays Music
By Mary Campbell

NEW YORK (AP) - Robert Moog, who developed the Moog Synthesizer - a machine that can sound like any musical instrument, and make weird bloop-bleeps as well-insists that the Moog isn't meant to replace the musician.

Someday you might be able to run a computer tape through one and have a melody come out, Moog (rhymes with vogue) says. But still, "somebody has to write the music and somebody has to program it into the computer."
Right now, the Moog - the standard one looks like an old-fashioned telephone switchboard with bunches of cords plugged into patches-is played by a human at a small keyboard.

George Harrison of the Beatles has one and so does Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. The Moog is often heard on rock records along with usual rock instruments. Sometimes there's a lot of retracking, because a Moog can only sound like one instrument at a time. It's heard and often not recognized - on television themes and commercials. And it's the instrument on the "Switched-on Bach" recording, transcriptions of 10 Bach pieces by Walter Carlos, a classical LP which has sold enough to become a gold record.
"Carlos's record," says Moog, "got popular, and a lot of people have tried to jump in the same ballpark. Like all instruments, it will be awhile before there's a large body of good music. Not everybody is writing good music for it now, but some are."
In writing music for the synthesizer, Moog says, "a composer is tempted to let the machine compose for him, just like a film maker is tempted to just let the camera run and not edit judiciously."

The first live concert on the Moog-all jazz, in late August-used four players and four machines: one sounded like an electric organ and provided the melody line; one played chords; one sounded like a bass, and the last one like percussion instruments-drums, two kinds of tambourines, etc.

The music wasn't terribly far out, but a bit weird, more the sound of a science fiction electric organ than of an ordinary electric organ.
The sounds don't exactly duplicate those of traditional instruments, but rather are as Moog says, "typically electronic."
Moog is adamant that his machine is not meant to replace the symphony orchestra. "If the symphony is failing," he declares, "it's because of the public taste, not because of the synthesizer."

But Moog doesn't like to predict the future. "The viola da gamba could be popular tomorrow for all I know. I have hope that the synthesizer will be a significant force. It's an appealing medium to me. But I can't guarantee it. I see it as doing everything, but on the other hand it might do nothing."

Moog's bent for music was apparent at age 2 when he could tell his mother the name of any note she played on the piano. For seven years, beginning at age seven, Moog went to the Manhattan School of Music. But since he was always inventing new kinds of coils and things, and since his father is an electrical engineer, he chose engineering as a career.

Since writing his Ph.D. thesis at Cornell on "Ultrasonic Absorption in Sodium Chloride" and getting his degree, Moog has been working on the synthesizer. He plans to refine the present Moog, which he calls experimental, and says that the next experiment will be with a patch cordless synthesizer.
Despite the early music training, Moog regards himself as all engineer. Moog holds one major patent, which he says "covers an essential portion of the circuitry, that rapidly changes tone color, and the voltage control filter, responsible for all the plucked string sounds and horn-like sounds."

Tone shapes are preprogrammed on the Moog. The sequence and timing of the notes are controlled by the playing of a keyboard. The keyboard isn't a limitation, Moog says. "It could support any other control devise. But we've built them with 31 notes to the octave and we're building one with 22. A keyboard enables you to set pitch intervals."
A couple of other synthesizers, the Buchla and Synket, work on different principles, and are less well known than the Moog.
Moog, his wife and three daughters, and his staff of 35 (five of them engineers, the rest support, production and administrative people) live and work in small Trumansburg, N.Y. They have built and sold some 200 synthesizers, many of them to colleges where composers are writing music especially for them.
A standard Moog costs from slightly over $4,000 to $13,000. But Moog isn't wealthy yet. "There are a lot of expenses in developing them," he says. "I haven't been able to see how to get wealthy."