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INART 55
History of Electroacoustic Music
Modular Component Systems
Bob Moog was a shy, awkward Brooklyn teenager whose refuge was his father's workshop, where he excelled at electronic hobbying. Having read about the theremin in a hobbyist magazine, he and his father learned to make them, perfecting the delicate technique of twisting the coils. Moog became so accomplished that he wrote an article on the theremin in a magazine. When other hobbyists started contacting him, he set up a home business making theremins in 1954, at the age of nineteen. He got a joint degree in physics at Queens College and electrical engineering at Columbia University. While he never even went to see the Columbia's electronic music center, he worked his way through college and graduate school at Cornell selling theremin kits. By 1960 he had developed a transistorized version of the instrument, and had to drop out of graduate school for six months to keep up with orders.After completing his Ph.D in Physics at Cornell, Moog set up a storefront in Ithaca, NY, to sell theremins full-time. In 1963, he went to a convention of the New York State School Music Association to display his wares. There, he met Herb Deutsch, a composer at Hofstra University, who was beginning to work with electronic and tape music but finding himself unable to produce all of the effects he wished to. They began an association, with Deutsch commissioning Moog to build new devices.
Moog was influenced by an article written by Harald Bode that appeared in Electronics magazine in 1961 describing modular components. This allowed basic parts to be configured flexibly, just as the software developed by Max Mathews allowed unit generators to be mixed and matched at will. Moog, however, was not working with digital systems, but with electronic components that controlled voltage levels. His first attempts were made on a "breadboard," which is an open circuit board onto which components may be soldered, with no cabinet or power supply. His first experiments involved oscillators and amplifiers in modular configurations. For example, two voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs) might be connected. Oscillator A might produce an audible pitch. Oscillator B might be set to produce a repeating wave, but at a sub-audio frequency (below 20 Hz). Oscillator B could be connected to Oscillator A in such a way that the fluctuations in Oscillator B's output affected the audible pitch produced by Oscillator A, producing a sound like a siren or a trill. In this configuration, Oscillator B is functioning as a low frequency oscillator (LFO) whose output could control the output of yet another oscillator. A voltage controlled amplifier (VCA) controlled volume levels. Connecting an LFO to an amplifier could produce oscillations in volume.
Moog worked with oscillators that generated sine, sawtooth, square, and triangle waves. He also developed voltage controlled filters (VCFs). He and Deutsch travelled to the University of Toronto and visited Hugh LeCaine's Electronic Music Studio. Moog found himself becoming part of the budding electronic music community in North America.
In 1964, he was invited to exhibit his products at the Audio Engineering Society convention. The convention director had heard about his work, and when another company dropped out at the last minute, he offered the exhibition space to Moog. In the showroom that featured glitzy exhibits by the biggest audio companies, he was "...a shy, awkward nerd, [sitting at] a card table with a little box with little modules and paper labels..." But people came up and started asking to buy things, and by the end of the convention he found he had inadvertently started a business. Vladimir Ussachevsky ordered a VCA, plus asked for a number of new devices to be created. One was an envelope generator that controlled volume levels through the duration of a tone. This later became a standard feature of Moog products, called an ADSR (Attack time, Decay time, Sustain level, Release time). It specified the amount of time it took a tone to reach maximum volume, then a rate of attenuation to a sustain level, which was maintained until a note was released, after which it would fade to silence according to the release time. Another item was an amplitude follower, which could set a volume level according to the level of an incoming signal.
SOURCES:
Alternative Music Press: An Interview with Dr. Robert Moog
Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music, Prentice Hall, 1997.
Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days, Harvard University Press, 2002.