Archives - 1975

Archives Main | 1975

 

Rolling Stone

February 13, 1975
That Little Old Wavemaker, Moog
His Machines, Less than Ten Years Old, Have Bent the Course of Music Forever
by BEN SIDRAN

All through the Fifties, at the Columbia/Princeton Labs in New Jersey, RCA worked to give computers human voices. The method was to develop an electronic sound synthesizer that would re-create the simple constituent parts of human speech. The project failed-the researchers never came up with a machine that could talk-and the effort would hardly be worth a mention today had not some of the scientists involved discovered that the electronic components they were good for making music. Thus, instead of a talking computer, the Columbia/Princeton research produced the first electronic music synthesizer. By now the synthesizer is here to stay. From Herbie Hancock to Stevie Wonder, from Edgar Winter to Billy Preston, the electronic synthesizer and related equipment have crept into popular music and flourished. Some insiders even predict that the synthesizer may ultimately replace the guitar as the most popular musical instrument, costing from $50 on up, and that kids will have their first exposure to music in school through electronic instruments (already the school market constitutes about 30% of today's synthesizer sales). Manufacturers are relentlessly competitive and within a year more that one truly polyphonic synthesizer will appear on the market for about $3000. Within two year, synthesizers will be built into guitars and other voltage-producing instruments.
The synthesizer found its place in popular music so the sooner you educate yourself to the way it works, the more you're going to enjoy it. Through most of the instrument's brief history, the name Moog has been synonymous with "synthesizer," much to the chagrin of Bob Moog's competition. Moog's company was formed in 1965, when the electronic music synthesizer was still a collection of esoteric hardware being used mostly by men with advanced degrees in math to produce atonal music-but by 1970 the firm was doing better than a half-million dollars in sales.
It was Walter Carlos's Switched-On-Bach in 1968 that broke it open for Moog. Carlos's flawless technique made it clear that the synthesizer was some- thing "you could play" rather than "some machine that played itself." That, and the novelty of the Moog synthesizer helped the album sell over 500,000 copies-unheard of for classical music-and within months the sound of the synthesizer was heard by millions.
One of those millions was Roger Powell, a musician/engineer who initially was not all that turned on "I had this prejudice about it being electronic and cold," he says, and yet within a year he became ARP's first artist-in-residence. Today he hold that position at the Moog factory. Perhaps no one performing musician (he tours with Todd Rundgren's Utopia) has had more input into the development of the synthesizer that Powell, and certainly few are as familiar with the potential scope of the instrument as he is.
The following interview with Bob Moog and Roger Powell was held especially for the ROLLING STONE instrument supplement.

With all the organ-type equipment around that calls itself a synthesizer, it's getting confused as to how far you can stretch the term. Can you say what is and what isn't a synthesizer? What would be the simplest model you could construct?

Moog: You would need one circuit to generate a vibration, one filter circuit to shape the overtones and one amplifier module to shape the overall loudness. Generally, a commercial synthesizer has a keyboard which controls the oscillator and triggers the amplifiers. There are other circuits which have a control function. You don't actually hear them, you hear their effect . . . pitch, tone, color or loudness. Then there are modulating oscillators which make periodic adjustments to the signal, unlike a contour generator which makes a one-shot thing when you press a key. So there are really six things that something being sold as a synthesizer should have: a tone oscillator, filter, amplifier, modulating oscillator, a contour generator and a keyboard.
How does a ring modulator work?

MOOG: It takes two sounds and produces a third sound with none of the original components of the original two bit the sum and difference pitches that come from these two sounds...

Powell: It is, in fact, a device which produces the pure distortion of those two sounds that go in because that's what distortion is: the intermodulation of two frequencies. This device gets rid of all the original frequencies and leaves you with only the pure distortion. Clean, pleasant sounding distortion, because it results from two pure frequencies going in. It's used in various ways. It's use to make bell-like effects, because you get mathematical partials, overtone-like things not actually part of the natural harmonic series. It's used to produce these clangorous effects but you can also get a beautiful, rolling, very rich, brassy effect. If you mix this in, you can get controlled distortion of keyboard instruments. This is very useful in a synthesizer because most of the tones are very pure and electronically perfect, so a ring modulator adds balls.

Bob, where are you putting your research and development money and what are we going to see in the future?

MOOG: We're putting our technology into three areas. One is education-to teach about the properties of sound, the relationship between sound and music, harmony and so forth. Two, live performance. There's no reason why electronic instruments can't be as exciting as acoustic instruments, and with technology going at the rate it is, the sounds and ways of controlling sounds can get more complex, more and more musician oriented. For example, in the next year we'll have a fully polyphonic synthesizer and you will to play up to 72 notes simultaneously if you want. Historically this will be an important instrument. And three, we're interested in the production of music. There's no reason why a musician can't think of his music differently in the studio than he does live. Here he doesn't have to be a great virtuoso but he have to have the facility for getting whatever sound be wants. Right now there are probably a couple hundred electronic studios, and there will be more and more.

What about synthesizers with memories?

MOOG: Year, sure. The larger in the future will obviously have that. Hybrid instruments between computers and analog synthesizers.

POWELL: Instead of working with a score and notation, you work with computer memory and a synthesizer and you can edit off the computer ...

Musicians in a recording studio, after 12 hours and a lot of drugs, often talk about triggering things with the electrical impulses from their brains-composing music directly out of their heads. As a hardware developer, what do you have to say about this kind of notion?

MOOG: You mean wiring yourself in?

Yeah, direct injection.

MOOG: That's a very far out concept...

POWELL: That same concept has been theorized by Manfred Eaton. For what it's worth he envisages a system whereby you not only monitor brain waves but all the voltages of your body, muscle twitches, eye movements, respiration heart beats. The signals are sent into a computer and translated...

MOOG: Body music? Yeah, but it's hard to control your body to such an extent, and in the second place, what does it mean that such-and-such a muscle twitches? How do you translate that musically? It's more a musical problem than a technical problem. You can control a synthesizer from anything. The other night I watched a guy try to control synthesizer from plants. Everybody sat around thinking kind thoughts and evil thoughts about the plants, and the synthesizer was supposed to go up and down. It didn't. But anything you feed into the control inputs will work. The problem is, what variations that you feed in there are going to sound like music?

Where are we in the maturity of the instrument?

MOOG: Just started. We've barely reached that age of reason. The industry will behave itself now, it will stay in tune, it can be played. It's more of an asset than it is a pain in the ass. The whole thing's only ten years old!

POWELL: Take the polyphonic instrument. It has, effectively, a synthesizer under every key, unheard of several years ago. You see, every instrument has definite limitations. A trumpet is definitely different than a trombone, even though they're part of the same family. But here is an instrument, all of a sudden, that really has infinite capabilities. One moment, it's the sound of a tornado, the next moment, a flute. You see, if musicians understand these principles well enough, they can design an instrument to their own specifications-an instrument that produces tone colors unique to their own music. It can only come from living with synthesizers for a time and this is what's going to happen. Technology is going to allow more people to design their own...

 

 

MOOG: That's right. It's not as if we're sitting around dreaming up instruments of the future. It's constant and tortuous trial by error, find a group of musicians who are comfortable one way and design around that, find another group that's comfortable another way.

Ten or 15 years ago, rock & roll piano consisted of Jerry Lee Lewis licks, In a way, we're at the mercy of commercially acceptable uses here.

POWELL: True. So far, not that many sounds have trickled out to the mass public. Only a few sounds are making the rounds-the pitch-bend wheel or the wah-wah filter.

Roger, as a keyboard player who is also in the vanguard of synthesizer players, would you say that these are two separate techniques?

POWELL: Yes, they are. There's definitely a cerebral thing about getting into a synthesizer. But ultimately you can develop a physical relationship with the instrument. It's just that people don't normally look at turning a know or pushing a wheel as being an expressive way of playing an instrument.

The technique, then, is going a whole new way. In terms of the interrelationship of noise and music, it's almost like when Coltrane turned left from be-bop and went off and many people couldn't tell if they were being mau-maued. But if it was a problem with Coltrane, then what were they to make of Albert Ayler and should they believe Pharaoh Sanders and all those new people who were coming up?

POWELL: That's a perfect example, because the advanced players were making the same kinds of sounds that beginning saxophone players normally make, or so it seemed to a large segment of the audience. In electronic music, when you first start toying with a synthesizer, it's fascination and you go out and just get all those raunchy sounds. Then you learn more subtle uses or you may end up staying with those same kinds of sounds.

As a player, where does your technique come from? With those newer horn players, for example, their technique was more body technique that finger technique, and you can say that was true for Cecil Taylor as well, ballet on the keys, very physical. Once you learn to control everything on a synthesizer, where does your technique come from?

POWELL: From your eyes. Yeah, it's visionary music.