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| Robert Arthur 'Bob' Moog |
Today
is the birthday of Robert Arthur "Bob" Moog
(May 23, 1934 – August 21, 2005), founder of Moog Music, was an American
pioneer of electronic music, best known as the inventor of the Moog
synthesizer. Bob Moog's innovative electronic design is employed in numerous
synthesizers including the Minimoog Model D, Minimoog Voyager, Little Phatty,
Moog Taurus Bass Pedals, Moog Minitaur, the Animoog ios app, and the
Moogerfooger line of effects pedals. Presenting a short note about life and
music of Robert Moog : Being Poet
Robert Moog was born in 1934 in New York City. When he was a
child, his mother encouraged him to study music, so he learned to play the
piano. Meanwhile, he spent a great deal of time with his father as well, with
whom he liked to tinker with electronics. By the time Moog had reached his
teenage years, these two interests had converged and building simple novelty
electronic musical instruments had become a hobby.
In 1949, Moog
built his first theremin from the instructions he found in a magazine. He was
fascinated with the theatrical and mysterious sounds the instrument, invented
by Russian inventor Leon Theremin in the 1920s, could create. The theremin is
played by waving your hands in the vicinity of two metal rods, controlling
pitch and volume, that are attached to a nondescript wooden cabinet. It is very
large and difficult to play, thus its popularity faded rather quickly.
Moog, however,
maintained his interest in the theremin throughout his college years. After he
received a BS in physics from Queens College and a BS in electrical engineering
from Columbia University, Moog pursued a doctoral degree in engineering physics
at Cornell University. While he was still a student, Moog founded the R.A. Moog
Company as a part-time business to design and build electronic musical
instruments. He also published an article for the January, 1961 issue of the
magazine 'Electronics World.' After the issue was published, Moog sold 1,000
theremin kits out of his three-room apartment.
Eventually Moog
began producing instruments of his own design. After toying with the idea of a
portable guitar amplifier, Moog turned to the synthesizer. During a convention
in 1963, Moog was introduced to the idea of building new circuits that would be
capable of producing sound. In 1964 he was invited to exhibit his circuits at
the Audio Engineering Society Convention. Shortly afterwards Moog completed his
PhD and began to manufacture electronic music synthesizers, and it was not long
before synthesizers went from being computers to instruments that could be
found in any music store.
Moog designed
his first synthesizers in collaboration with the composers Herbert A. Deutsch,
and Walter Carlos. Significantly, Moog's was the first synthesizer to use
attack-decay-sustain-release (ADSR) envelopes, set with four different knobs,
which control the qualities of a sound's onset, intensity and fade. Like many
of his designs, Moog's envelope generators became a basic component of later
synthesizers. The sound was monophonic -- one note at a time -- but that was
enough, since studio recording techniques could create whole orchestras from
single notes by the late 1960s. Moog's synthesizer also boasted the
voltage-controlled lowpass filter that came to be known as the Moog filter,
capable of making a variety of full horn, string and vocal timbres. The filter
was patented in 1968.
After the
success of Carlos's album "Switched on Bach," entirely recorded using
Moog synthesizers, Moog's instruments leapt into commercial popular music. In
1971, the name of his company was changed to Moog Music, Inc., and in 1973 the
company became a division of Norlin Music, Inc. Moog served as president of
Moog Music until 1977. The Micromoog was the last synthesizer created by Moog
to bear his name. After Norlin took over his company, including synthesizer
design, Moog spent the rest of his days at the company designing guitar effects
and guitar amplifiers. He left Moog Music in 1977, blaming corporate politics
for his departure.
Moog and his
family moved from New York State to western North Carolina in 1978. There he
founded Big Briar, Inc. for the purpose of designing and building novel
electronic music equipment, especially new types of performance control
devices. At the International Computer Music Conference in 1982, he introduced
the multiple-touch-sensitive keyboard, developed with John Eaton of Indiana
University. In addition to responding to the downward motion of a key, the
keyboard also sensed the horizontal position of the finger playing it. From
1984 to 1988, Moog was a full-time consultant and Vice President of New Product
Research for Kurzweil Music Systems.
Moog's awards
include the Silver Medal of the Audio Engineering Society; the Trustee's Award
of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences; the Billboard Magazine
Trendsetter's Award; and the SEAMUS award from the Society of Electroacoustic
Music in the United States. Today Moog lives in Asheville, North Carolina where
he continues to serve as president of Big Briar. The company is currently working
on building theremins, MIDI interfaces, effects modules and electronic musical
instrument kits. Moog's newest project is an "interactive piano" that
uses a touch screen the size of a laptop to take the place of sheet music. The
piano has 128 sounds, including a digitally sampled Steinway grand, and 256
tracks for recording.
(source : www.web.mit.edu)
