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Bob moog soundsource problme11/8/2022 ![]() ![]() A Moog modular synthesizer from the 1960s. As they warmed up, the synthesizers drifted out of tune. ![]() Moog’s early voltage-controlled oscillators, which produce the raw electrical waveforms, were susceptible to current fluctuations from the electric grid and to temperature changes. That was despite its temperamental nature. But the high quality captivated musicians. It was not the first synthesizer–a point that Moog-Koussa herself emphasizes. The device was capable of producing over 250,000 sounds. In 1964, he built his first “portable electronic music composition system,” later dubbed a synthesizer. Unlike the college-dropout entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, Moog stayed in school–earning a PhD in physics from Cornell in 1965, while continuing his theremin business. The Moogseum’s Learning Synthesis interactive exhibit. “And that’s just one of our lessons, out of 10.” “We have 13,000 young children who can read waveforms and explain to you the variances in pitch and volume,” says Moog-Koussa. The 10-week curriculum now reaches about 3,000 second-graders a year in western North Carolina. This would extend the foundation’s regional education program, Doctor Bob’s Sound School, which began in 2011. It’s finalizing the design for the ThereScope, a battery-powered device that combines a theremin, amplifier, and oscilloscope to visualize the electrical waveforms behind sounds.Ī prototype of the ThereScope, an educational device for grade school students. The foundation she leads has an ambitious plan to bring hands-on education to schools across the country. “Our work in education and archives preservation, and now with the Moogseum, will extend way beyond people who play synthesizers,” she says. Moog-Koussa isn’t just trying to cater to people who are already familiar with her father’s work. Three Moog theremins are on display in the museum. Invented by Léon Theremin in the 1920s and a staple of sci-fi classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still, the instrument allows players to create eerie tones by moving their hands through electrical fields. He developed that feel when he started building and selling theremins, beginning at age 14 or 15 (Moog said both in different interviews). One of the vintage Moog theremins on display at the Moogseum. The Moogseum packs a lot into its 1,400 square feet, including iconic instruments like the Minimoog Model D and Minimoog Voyager synthesizers, an interactive timeline of synth technology from 1898 to today, and a replica of Moog’s workbench. The Minimoog Model D consolidated modular synthesizers into a compact instrument that remains popular today. ![]() “It was like the sound of the future.” Indeed it was: Today, Moog synthesizers are standard kit for many leading musicians, from Kanye to Lady Gaga. “We’re transforming their voices and turning trash cans into drum kits, and we’re sounding like aliens just when we cough.”īut “when we first heard the sound of a Moog synthesizer in the late ’60s and early ’70s. “Nothing fazes the students now,” says Richard Boulanger, professor of electronic production and design at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and a protégée of both Moog and Pearlman. With today’s software-defined digital media, it’s harder to appreciate the naked physics of early electronic music and the radical transformation that manipulating these forces enabled. Moog also collaborated with other inventors–including digital music pioneer Max Mathews and even rival synth maker Alan Pearlman (who died in January). His synthesizers found incredibly diverse applications–from Herb Deutsch’s avant-garde compositions to Bernie Worrell’s funkadelic jams to Wendy Carlos’s classical music blockbuster Switched on Bach. He became a celebrity, and people used “Moog” (which rhymes with “vogue”) as a synonym for electronic music.Ī classically trained pianist, Moog worked closely with a wide range of musicians to understand what they wanted out of a device for generating electronic music. Instead, “he’s the one who made it mainstream,” says Mark Ballora, professor of music technology at Penn State University. Moog, who died in 2005, did not invent the synthesizer. (It’s unaffiliated with Moog Music, the company her father founded.) Bob Moog at work in the early 1990s. ![]() #Bob moog soundsource problme archive#It’s the latest project of the Bob Moog Foundation–the nonprofit archive and educational institution established in 2006 by his youngest daughter, Michelle Moog-Koussa. It celebrates not only Moog’s innovations, but also those of his contemporaries who created the synthesizers and other devices that transformed music beginning in the ’60s and ’70s. This month, celebrating what would be the inventor’s 85th birthday, that storefront reopens as the Moogseum. ![]()
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