Moog synthesizer

The Moog synthesizer emerged simultaneously on opposite coasts from composers who had never heard of each other. In fall 1963, Robert Moog—a Cornell doctoral student who manufactured theremins as a side business—met composer Herb Deutsch at a music trade fair in Rochester. Deutsch asked Moog to build an instrument that would create new sounds for his compositions. Six months later, they had a prototype.

The adjacent possible was electronic and musical. Moog had been building transistorized theremins since 1961, and his 1956 visit to Raymond Scott's Manhattan Research facility had planted the idea of keyboard-controlled electronic instruments. But the key breakthrough was the voltage-controlled oscillator: a circuit where pitch changed in proportion to input voltage. Moog designed around a standard of one volt per octave, and this specification—along with voltage-controlled amplifiers, envelopes, noise generators, and filters—became the industry standard that persists today.

Three thousand miles away in San Francisco, composers Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick approached Don Buchla at the San Francisco Tape Music Center with the same request. A Rockefeller Foundation grant allocated $500 for Buchla to build an "electronic studio in a box." By 1965, both inventors had working prototypes—arrived at independently, without knowledge of each other. Moog used keyboards and subtractive synthesis; Buchla rejected keyboards as limiting and pioneered sequencer-driven composition. The convergence proved the concept was inevitable once transistors made voltage control practical.

Commercial breakthrough required translation to the mainstream. In October 1968, Wendy Carlos released Switched-On Bach, a recording of Bach compositions performed one painstaking note at a time on monophonic Moog synthesizers—five months and 1,000 hours of labor. The album briefly passed the Beatles' White Album on the charts, sold a million copies by 1974, and won three Grammys including Best Classical Album. Giorgio Moroder later cited it as one of his earliest influences; his 1977 "I Feel Love" with Donna Summer became the blueprint for electronic dance music.

Rock adopted the Moog almost immediately. George Harrison purchased a custom dual-keyboard Moog in 1969; it appeared on Abbey Road. Keith Emerson became the first major rock musician to perform live with the instrument, spending £4,000 to import one from America. At Emerson, Lake & Palmer's 1970 Isle of Wight Festival debut, his "Lucky Man" solo—recorded in a single take without his knowledge—became one of the earliest Moog solos in rock. By the mid-1970s, the synthesizer had become a staple of progressive rock, and the instrument born from a theremin maker's side project had permanently expanded what music could sound like.