Interview with three pioneers of Electronic Music
There is a nice interview in
New Scientist magazine with three Electronic Music pioneers.
Bob Moog developed the
first synthesizer using control voltages which used the standard of one volt per octave. This allowed all sorts of modules to 'talk' to each other and moved the synthesizer from the studio and onto the performance stage.
Peter Vogel co-founded
Fairlight Instruments. This was the first commercially available keyboard that could 'sample' a sound and play it back over a large range of notes. Fairlight (and to some extent Synclavier) was the workstation of choice for a long long time.
Dave Stuart was the force behind creating MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface - the way keyboards and synthesizers 'talk' to each other now -- MIDI has been accepted by all manufacturers and is the de-facto standard). Stuart also founded Sequential Circuits which built the first commercially mass-produced polyphonic synthesizers with programmability. This was a major help in making them accessible to the average musician.
The interview only really skims the surface but if you like what you see, a little time spent with Google will turn up lots and lots more pages of fun reading. A fascinating era that produced many still-valuable machines...
Posted by DaveH at March 27, 2005 4:57 PM
