The inventor of the synthesizer talks about technology and modernity.

By Rob Hochschild
Berklee.edu Editor
September 3, 2003

	Robert Moog (right), with Berklee Vice President of Information Technology David Mash.
	Photo by Bob Kramer

Moog studied organs made by Hammond and Baldwin in subsequent years and in the 1960s, invented an electronic keyboard which he would eventually name the synthesizer. His company, Moog Music, Inc., manufactured the Minimoog and other analog synthesizers, and demand for the instruments grew as they began appearing on popular recordings, such as Wendy Carlos's Switched-On Bach, the Beatles' Abbey Road, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer's "Lucky Man."

The 69-year-old Moog continues to work as Chief Technical Officer of Moog Music. He visited Berklee last September for the 2002 Convocation, at which time he received an honorary doctor of music degree and watched students give him and fellow honoree Patty Larkin a musical tribute. Not long ago, he gave a telephone interview from his North Carolina office and talked about inventing the synthesizer, his favorite Moog musicians, and the challenges musicians face in what he called today's fragmented society.

RH: When you were developing the synthesizer, how did you go about balancing your musical and technological aims?

RM: I didn't have musical aims at all and I don't think I had technological aims. I had interests. I had interest in learning as much as I could about current electronic technology and I enjoyed working with musicians. Whatever the musician I was working with wanted to do that was fine with me. The process of helping a musician make the kinds of sound and the kind of music he could imagine was the main thing for me. I enjoyed doing it. I didn't worry about what it was leading to.

What are the intellectual tools and mindset that helps an inventor become a successful one, one who continues to produce and move into new areas?

Well, there is a certain type of mind, which I suppose I have, that looks forward. One way to answer your question is by mentioning a movie I saw 15 or 20 years ago, called The Clan of the Cavebear. It was a grade C or Grade D movie. It wasn't a big movie. But the basic idea behind the movie was that there are two kinds of people: the kinds of people who look back and are interested in doing things as they've always been done and people who look forward.

There's a certain tension between these two groups of people but both are necessary for the well-being of humanity. By nature, I tend to look for different and new ways of doing things. I don't like people telling me, 'This is how it's done,' because I like to discover myself how to do something, and in doing that, sometimes I come up with a better way. A lot of people are like that. That's one type of personality.

The theremin was seen as a musical instrument with unique and malleable qualities when it came out. Did you see the synthesizer the same way? Were you trying to create a particular sound?

No. We wanted to make it as general as possible. The way a synthesizer works is that there are very basic elements that a musician combines in various ways to make new sounds. It's more like a box of tools, a kit of parts. They're new parts, but they're parts that the musician then puts together to make what he wants. I never thought of the synthesizer as having a sound of its own. It does, as it turns out. You can usually finger a Moog synthesizer if you hear one, but that's not what I set out to do.

How did the concept for the first synthesizer come together in 1964?

What we made was components of an instrument. At first we made a modular synthesizer, where each module performed a single function. It wasn't until 1967 that we had the idea that we could have a complete system of modules. Somehow it would be integrated. Before that, if you wanted a hammer, we would sell you a hammer. If you wanted a screwdriver, we'd sell you a screwdriver. It was only in 1967 that we said, "If you want to buy a complete kit of parts, you can make all sorts of musical sounds with this kit of parts, and it's called a synthesizer."

Wendy Carlos had a huge hit using your products on Switched-On Bach. How did that album affect recognition of the synthesizer?

The conventional wisdom in the music business, as opposed to the world of academic music, was you could use the synthesizer to make funny sounds and get people's attention but you couldn't make real music with it. And Carlos developed the technique and sold the records that said, "Yes, you can make real music."

	Moog (left), moments after receiving his honorary degree from President Lee Eliot Berk.
	Photo by Bob Kramer

Well, certainly all of Carlos's recordings defined a new standard in technical and artistic excellence in terms that any musician would understand. I'm very fond of a lot of Carlos's recordings, besides Switched-On Bach. My favorite, even to this very day, is Beauty in the Beast, which I think is very beautiful.

There were a few other recordings made in the late 60s, some of which were widely distributed, others just made privately, that expanded what could be done on the synthesizer. Andrew Rudin, at the Philadelphia Music Academy, did some remarkable compositions. A young composer who I worked with, Jonathan Weiss, did some really beautiful stuff. I can't think of all the stuff that was really good back then, but there was a lot of it.

On the commercial side, of course, anything Keith Emerson did was completely different. But still very electrifying, and very much along the lines of expanding what people understood you could do with synthesizers.

(Keyboardist) Don Preston, who was in Frank Zappa's band, is a very sensitive, very talented musician. Jan Hammer was the first one to really show people how to be a virtuoso performer of the pitch pinwheel (on the Minimoog). His stuff still sounds great to me.

I read an interview where you talked about music coming out of people's social interaction, rather than out of the act of just being in their own little boxes. Why is that issue important to you, and how has your view of it changed?

Most music, even most music today, is based on a model: a bunch of musicians sitting around playing. Even if music is made in the studio by one person, the idea is to swing, like a group of real musicians does. And if you can pull that off, if you can create that illusion, then people generally call you a good electronic composer.

Back in the 70s, music producers used to joke about how music was becoming fragmented. People were phoning their parts in, that was a big joke then. Today they e-mail their parts in. It's even more fragmenting and isolating then people could dream of in the 70s.

Do you think this tendency toward increased fragmentation in the music industry is a reflection of the way our culture is going in general these days?

Yes, I do. We're more and more isolated from each other. I use the example of going to work, and everyone is in their own car. At work I spend a lot of time at my computer. It's a concern of mine that with technology and the complexity of our everyday life that we're losing some benefit of the simple social interactive things that people throughout the centuries have enjoyed.

One could look at you as a bridge between early 20th Century inventors, such as Leon Theremin, and today's music industry. With computers and technology being such a huge part of music now, you appear to have been a part of the technology revolution in music.

Yes, I have. I stop way short of claiming responsibility for any of it, but I've definitely been there as it has happened.

But it would be hard to underestimate the influence of the synthesizer on contemporary music, the way music sounds today, the way it's performed and recorded and composed. I don't suppose you ever saw it going this way when you first brought your products to market, did you?

Nobody did. If you asked people in 1965 what was going to happen, people would say, "Well I heard about something called an eight-track recorder. Maybe that's how people are going to make music now, with an eight-track recorder." I can remember when Switched-On Bach was made, an eight-track recorder was absolute state of the art.

Some people have said synthesizers and other electronic instruments have taken jobs away from musicians.

That's bull. Any tool will shift the economic viability of a person's trade, toward the person with the tool, and away from the person without the tool. I don't think that the total number of hours put into producing music is any less now than it's ever been. It wasn't that long ago that you could get a hundred musicians together in a room and in a three-hour recording session, have an hour of great music. Nobody's going to produce an hour of great music on the tube today without putting in thousands of hours putting it together. Carlos did the album after two years of work.

	Student keyboardist Ruslan Sirota plays the Minimoog at the 2002 Convocation.
	Photo by Bob Kramer

I was just blown away by the talent, the degree of professionalism. What was really great was that these kids were playing together. I don't want to say it's a dying art, but it's still a high art to be able to play together, at least as high an art as being able to craft something one sound at a time on a computer.

How about the student (Ruslan Sirota) who played Minimoog?

He's got world-class chops.

What would be your advice to Berklee students in relation to using technology as they learn to make music?

Music is something more than entertainment. It's something people need. It's something that makes their life worthwhile. The level of professionalism and skill that musicians are taught at Berklee enable them, providing they can make contact with that need, to satisfy the need effectively in a professional way. There are certain times all musicians figure, "Ah I'm gonna do what makes me happy, the hell with everybody else." That's not the professional attitude. The professional attitude is, "There are people out here who need you." They're willing to pay money, but more than that they're willing to put a lot of emotional energy into making contact with you and accepting and receiving what you have to give and that's an obligation to take your giving very seriously.

Music isn't about being clever with a computer, it isn't about being athletic, with how many notes you can play on your guitar in a second. It's about whatever it takes to exercise your place in humanity. It's a place where you give to other people.

What advice would you give to the music instrument inventors of the future?

It definitely helps to have some technical discipline, some technical training. In my case, engineering. It definitely helps to have an understanding of business. You can't do anything professional in something like electronics without a lot of money. Just because you want to do something doesn't mean you're entitled to take somebody else's money and do it. You need to understand how to manage that money.

It's just like a trumpet player has to have a certain degree of physical strength to blow his horn. Being able to manage money in my field is like a good set of lungs for a trumpet player.

Is your company making any digital synthesizers, or all analog?

Right now we're making all analog. There is some digital technology in the new Minimoog, but the sound is analog. It's what I know how to do best. I don't have the feeling that digital is bad and analog is good, it's just that I know how to make good analog stuff so that's what I'm doing.

So you don't share the opinion of some people that the analog synthesizer is by definition warmer than a digital synth?

Not by definition, but it often works out like that now. Maybe someday we'll all know how to make warm digital instruments, but it's easier to do and right now it's generally true that analog instruments just sound better.

What changes do you anticipate in music instruments and the music industry in coming years?

That's always a very hard thing to say. There was a time not long ago that people would have scoffed at the idea of a turntable as a musical instrument or a computer as a musical instrument. It wasn't that long ago that was considered ridiculous. I think a computer is a great musical tool. As I said several times in this interview, I hope using a computer to make music in isolation, away from your listeners and away from musicians will not be the dominant way technology is used.

Links of Interest
•	Convocation 2002