When electronic music synthesizers were first being developed, there were two schools of design - the East Coast machines made by Bob Moog and others were controlled by voltages*** and the step of one volt would result in the change of one octave of frequency. This made performances of written music fairly easy and the programability meant that an artist could go on stage night after night and play the same music.
The West Coast designs were intended for spontaneous sound generation as well as some musical performance. They did not enjoy the one volt per octave control that Moog's designs offered but they were a lot cheaper and more oriented to improvisation. Don Buchla at Berkeley, CA was one of these makers ( Serge Tcherepnin in Hollywood, CA was another ).
Don passed away today - from the UK Guardian:
Don Buchla, modular synthesizer pioneer, dies aged 79
Don Buchla, the groundbreaking synthesizer inventor, has died age 79.
He was considered a true iconoclast with an uncompromising vision of what synthesizers could be. His impact on electronic music was vast; Buchla independently invented the first modern synthesizer, at the same time as Robert Moog, in 1963.
Although Moog is often credited with having invented the first modular synthesizer, Moog even admitted during his lifetime that Buchla was the first to have a full concept of how to put all the modules together to add up to an instrument.
“He invented a whole new paradigm for how you interface with electronics – much more human, and a whole new thing,” says Buchla’s close friend Morton Subotnick.
His company is still going strong: Buchla Electronic Music Instruments - some fascinating designs.
I am very much in the East coast camp - I like using a keyboard and prefer linear music instead of an Aleatoric mash of bleeps and bloops.
*** As a side note, designing a circuit to do one volt per octave control is actually a very complex bit of engineering. Consider a "Concert A" at 440 vibrations per second (noted as Hz after physicist Heinrich Hertz). Play an "A" one octave below and that is 220Hz, play one octave above and you have 880Hz. Up another octave and you are at 1,760Hz. The scale is not a linear one, it is exponential and converting a linear value to an exponential one is tricky and the simplest circuit (that everyone uses) is horribly temperature sensitive so you have to compensate for that. Earlier Moog synthesizers that I played in college (40 years ago) would require you to re-tune if the HVAC came on. I was running a tape recorder and layering audio so needed to keep everything in tune.
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