Into Our Lives with Moog

Modern technology has spawned a new kind of instrument maker. The old craftsmen of music worked with wood, strings and valves; the new ones hook up wires, transistors and wave generators. The sounds the new products make are not echoes of the human voice but a bizarre collection of buzzes, bleeps and squawks. Nonetheless, the men responsible for them are the potential Stradivaris and Steinways of electronic music, and their forbiddingly complex instruments are made for the musicians of the future--who are destined to be as much composer-technicians as performers.

Foremost among the new instrument makers is Robert Moog, 34, an amateur musician with a Ph.D. in engineering physics from Cornell. The electronic synthesizer that bears his name --a 4-ft.-long contraption that looks like the control panel of a jet airliner with an organ keyboard grafted onto it--is by far the most effective device yet developed to produce electronic sounds. Besides serving as an "orchestra" for works by avant-garde composers, the Moog (rhymes with vogue) produced the bing-bong theme that for years preceded all CBS-TV color shows and the clarion call that heralds Westinghouse television commercials. The most spectacular application of the Moog to date is Composer Walter Carlos' electronic "orchestration" of ten Bach compositions for a Columbia LP called Switched-On Bach. The album has sold nearly 150,000 copies in four months, which makes it the hottest classical LP since Van Cliburn's 1958 version of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto. The album's widespread appeal bears out what Composer John Eaton says of Moog: "He has brought electronic music out of the lab and into our lives."

The basic elements of Moog's machine are amplifiers, mixers, filters anc voltage-controlled oscillators. Some ol these, connected to the keyboard, trigger various "raw" sounds, such as "sawtooth" waves and "white noise." Other parts then modify the raw sounds by controlling their attack, volume and rate of decay, and by adding such characteristics as vibrato or echo. Complicated combinations of sounds--like the counterpoint and chords of Carlos' Bach album--are achieved by taping each series of sounds as they are produced, then combining them on multiple tracks of the same tape.

The Moog's great distinctions are its size, price--$6,850 for a professional model--and vastly improved flexibility over earlier synthesizers (the first one, built by RCA in 1955, was a room-size monster that cost approximately $100,000). Because its voltage controls can precisely "shape" tones as they are being produced, the Moog affords more spontaneous variations of sounds than other comparable synthesizers, and far more subtlety and musicality.

As a youngster in New York City, Bob Moog grew up with a musical background--but that was where he wanted to keep it: in the background. He dutifully yawned his way through twelve years of piano lessons to please his parents. Rather than practice, he preferred to tinker at electronic gadgets in the basement with his father, an electrical engineer. When he was 16, his teachers told him that he had the talent to become a professional pianist. Instead, Moog gave up the keyboard for good, plunging into college studies of electrical engineering and physics.

Beatle Customers. By the time he was a graduate student at Cornell, Moog had been introduced to avant-garde electronic music by Composer Herbert Deutsch, who collaborated with him on his first synthesizer. Moog went heavily into debt to start production in his storefront workshop in the little town of Trumansburg (pop. 2,000) in upstate New York. In the five years since then, he has found 150 customers--mostly universities and music schools, but also the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Now the orders are piling up faster than he can fill them.

Moog-has no intention of leaving Trumansburg to return to Manhattan. He likes to "go out into the woods for hours and listen to the beauty of natural sounds," and he enjoys the steady stream of visiting composers who consult with him on tailoring synthesizers to their needs. He is now trying to combine a synthesizer with a computer, so that a complex set of effects can be programmed and then reproduced instantly. That would clear the way, perhaps within ten years, for a home-model synthesizer that people could sit down and play in their living rooms--just as they now play Beethoven on the piano.

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