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St. Louis Post-Dispatch

October 1, 1972
The Synthesizer Wants YOU
By Frank Peters

THE SYNTHESIZER business is so young that three years ago takes us back to its infancy. In 1969 the "Switched-On Bach" record was hitting the country with the force of a tropical sunrise and Robert Moog followed the shock wave around, explaining the wonderful new musical instrument he had put together. Moog lectured in Powell Hall in November 1969. By then St. Louis had one Moog Synthesizer in busy and profitable operation, turning out commercials for Technisonic Studios, and a detailed description of the instrument had appeared on this page two months earlier. Tens of millions of people had heard the synthesizer at that time but few had seen one and even fewer knew how to make it work. It was a laboratory thing. "Switched-On Bach" took a year to produce.
Moog was back in town Wednesday to lecture at Washington University - a descriptive talk for students in general-and to tell in conversation what has happened to the synthesizer in the last three years. The most significant change is commercial rather than technical: the synthesizer is becoming a performance instrument, with dealerships and a home market and competition. You can buy a Moog instrument for about $600 now. It is a short keyboard with control panel to be plugged in to an electronic organ and played as a solo manual, or it may be played alone through the amplifier and speakers of any home sound system. It is small but it embodies the essential synthesizer characteristic, which is the capacity to generate extremely complicated audio wave forms and amplitude contours - one note at a time.

THE "ONE NOTE at a time" clause remains a bottleneck. By bringing the oscillators, filters and contour controls of a synthesizer to bear on one tone, it can be made to sound like virtually any instrument; Moog described a laboratory set-up in which Stradivarius violin sound, as distinct from other violin sound, has been artificially created to the experimenters' satisfaction. To extend this capacity over many simultaneous notes so that harmony may be produced and standard compositions played is possible by giving each note on a keyboard its own synthesizer, but this would be ridiculously expensive and, in Moog's word, "crude."
Moog said he was working on the multiple-voice problem. John Eaton the composer, with the resources of Indiana University's huge music department be- hind him, has engaged Moog in development of a performance synthesizer with several manuals, like an organ console, and Moog hopes it will be ready in two years. A student at Washington University questioned Moog pointedly about a breakthrough in the Allen organ. Over the years the Allen has been a high-quality (and expensive) electric keyboard instrument in the organ market. Recently it took the computer route to a new stage of sophistication and appears to occupy a technological corner of its own, with the synthesizer and the common electric "organ" at the other two points of the triangle.

 

In rough terms, the new Allen uses a data-storage system to select audio wave forms-the organ "stops"-from a programmed selection of them, and gets around, the one-note-at-a-time obstacle with the help of a scanning beam that takes the place of the usual keyboard linkage and gives the sound generators independence from a given key. Moog's own idea for a polyphonic synthesizer is still under his hat but independent key-to-tonality relation seems to be a part of it; he pointed out that only as many sound generators are needed as the maximum number of tones to be played simultaneously. In the standard keyboard literature six would be enough. Moog criticized the Allen system for applying a given wave form to notes up and down the scale; the partials of a musical instrument vary according to pitch, he said, and his own system could reproduce these variations.
TO COMPOSERS, who have been tinkering with electronic music for decades and to most serious musicians the idea of imitation - the imitation of standard instruments by artificial means - is anathema. The composer says, quite correctly, that if he wants a trumpet sound he will get it best by hiring a trumpeter. The musician sees the shadow of unemp1oyment in imitative music devices, going back to the theater organ of the '20s and the phonograph record itself.
Yet imitation keeps coming back to call the tune. For one thing, as Moog pointed out in a question-and-answer session Wednesday, the "best" sounds to our ears-the interesting, stimulating, exciting ones, as well as the beautiful ones -tend to be horrendously complicated. Any fool can produce beeps from a simple oscillator-those pure, flat, dead beeps that an earlier generation of electronic-music composer employed so generously-but nobody wants to listen to it. However artfully stacked on tape, the beeps constituted tonal boredom. The synthesizer sound has been, from the beginning, "popular." Even when it isn't imitating something it can grab the attention and give pleasure; the prize-winning beer commercials from Technisonic are witness.
For another thing, the synthesizer was virtually obliged by the laws of economic survival to find a market wider than that afforded by universities and commercial studios. Moog almost went broke in 1970, in spite of a $600,000 gross, and a year ago merged with MuSonics, Inc., a younger competitor that needed Moog's name and scientific expertise as much as Moog needed MuSonic's business resources.

THE NEW FIRM is called MoogMusic Inc., with the 37-year-old physical-acoustical-electrical engineer as president and the former head of MuSonics, William L. Waytena, as, chairman and chief executive officer. The address moved from Moog's old converted store in Trumansburg, N.Y., to MuSonics' home in Williamsville, N.Y., a Buffalo suburb. The Moog Inc. gross is climbing again, past $1,000,000, and it is rumored that the firm will create two divisions, one concerned with commercial money-makers like the Minimoog, the other devoted to technological heavies like the supersynthesizer in Bloomington, Ind.
Hardly anything about the synthesizer is patentable; it is a "system" or organization of well-known electronic components rather than an invention. So Moog has competition, chiefly from Allen R. Pearlman's ARP Instruments of Boston. ARP makes synthesizers much like Moog's, with different controls, such as a switch system in lieu of the Moog patch cords. (Washington University did not show its guest its own electronic music lab in the attic of the Music Building, for it is full of recently purchased ARP equipment.) The synthesizer built by Don Buchla on the West Coast is favored by certain composers, includ-ing Morton Subotnick, and enjoys high respect but is not on the mass market. Moog is braced for the inevitable Japanese entry into the synthesizer business.

 

The popularization of electronic music - through Moog's organization of sophisticated tone modifiers into a usable, compact instrument - has blurred some old distinctions. The crude imitative music devices of the Hammond organ type have moved quickly toward more sophistication.
Harmoniums the size of clarinet cases, the kind heard in rock bands and known with the generic name of keyboard, sometimes are sold as synthesizers and nobody can challenge it because there is no rigid definition. At the same time the 24-karat synthesizers like Moog's have been reaching into the mass market. On the lowest level of music-making, chord organs have decked themselves hysterically with all sorts of technological blossoms. One big-selling variety uses photoelectric discs from which to tap, with keyboard controls, rhythms, drum rolls, applause and a dozen other one-man-band sound effects. The only musical skill required is to play the leading melody-one note at a time.