Archives - 1969

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Polytechnic Engineer

October 1969

Moog
By Fred Ballard

IT'S bigger than a breadbox, but, in the jargon of the recording industry, it might be the biggest "bread" box ever built. It's the Moog Synthesizer, and its first album sold 50,000 copies, at $5.95 each, within six weeks of its release. Even more interesting is the fact that the album, entitled "Switched-On Bach", was entirely classical music consisting of 'electronic realizations and performances' of various works by Johann Sebastian Bach. Its popularity makes it the largest selling Bach album ever and the most notable release in the field since Van Cliburn's landmark 1958 recording of Tchaikovsky's piano works.

But, more significantly, its popularity with the public, particularly the fans of serious music, has brought the idea of electronics in music to a position of importance it had not previously enjoyed. Electronic synthesis of music is not a new concept; however, previous efforts in the field were limited to a small group of pioneers who were seriously hampered by having to use equipment designed largely for other purposes.
Although synthesizers had been built previous to Moog's design, their use was limited to ''producced'' music with little or no capability to perform "live". Accordingly, progress was slow, and electronic music found that it had become an art unto itself. The Moog, however, provided the very important advancement of being more nearly an instrument, capable of being "played', than any other previous effort.

 

This remarkable capability, and its demonstration in the album of Bach works, has shown, in the words of Robert Moog himself, that "the medium of electronic music is eminently suited to the realization of much traditional music and, in doing so, has firmly brought the electronic medium into the historical mainstream of music.

Early in the l930's a device called the Trautoniunm came into being. Developed in Germany by Dr. Friedrich Trautwein, it was an early attempt to put the idea of electronic synthesis of tone and tonality into a form readily usable as an instrument. The basic form of the Trautonium's control s was very similar to an ordinary organ console, except that the keyboard manuals were replaced with special sensors, and the stops were replaced by controls for various tone-color filters. Originally, it was played by the players hands moving above the sensors, but this system was later replaceed by a touch-sensitive ribbon contact. It was a notable first in that it did not provide pre-determined combinations of harmonic filters, or any particular tonalities designed to imitate standard sounds, but rather provided controls over these elements to allow the player to select and create whatever sort of tone-color.

Not until 1955 (did the idea of the musical synthesizer reach a workable form; in that year the RCA Mark I Synthesizer was built. A huge machine, both in size and price, it cost $100,000 and filled a good-sized room with its nine banks of oscillators, amplifiers, and shaping circuits. Major innovations of the (device were features that allowed far more flexibility of sound than any one of the previous attempts, with much more convenience. Instructions for shaping the waveform were punched into a roll of paper tape, in a manner similar to the old player-piano, but on a much more sophisticated level.