History of Electronic Music: Robert Moog

When someone thinks of electronic music, the first thing that comes to mind is the sound of a synthesizer. All the weird blips, echoes, rumbles and screeches that we've come to associate with an entire branch of music came about almost accidentally. The father of computer-generated noise was a man named Robert Moog (rhymes with "vogue" and "rogue"). A genius engineer with a love for what electricity can do to sound, Moog revolutionized the way people have made music for the past 40 years.

Born and raised in the Bronx, New York in 1934, Moog showed an early talent for engineering and physics. He attended The Bronx High School of Science, one of the most highly regarded specialized schools in the nation. From there he went on to Queens College of New York to attain a BS in Physics followed by a BS in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, finally achieving his PhD in Engineering Physics from Cornell by the end of the 1950's.

Just after graduating from high school, an enterprising Bob Moog founded his first company, the R.A. Moog Company. The original purpose of the R.A. Moog Co. was to construct theremin kits. Later, the company would be re-purposed as a manufacturer for Moog's revolutionary synthesizers.

While working at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, the place where essentially every component of electronic music devices used today has its origin, Moog invented a number of important synthesizer elements. He developed the Voltage Control Oscillator, which controls signal frequency, among many other components.

The original Moog Synthesizer is what is known as a Modular Synthesizer. The basic idea of a Modular Synthesizer is to create a sound from constituent pieces, like pitch and volume. These old synthesizers required users to connect a series of wires, sort of like a classic telephone operator's board. The first Moog Synthesizers came with an extensive instruction manual that included a list of instruments and how to synthesize their sounds using the modules. Many musicians eschewed the manual altogether and began fiddling with the modules without guidance. So, a lot of the weird sounds we think of today when we talk about "synth" resulted from musicians simply messing around with a complicated device. Nobody wanted to record fake violin sounds, but robotic blips became all the rage.

While Robert Moog wasn't the first person to create a synthesizer, he contributed one particularly elegant interface solution that remains the standard for modern synth technology. Moog decided to connect his modular synthesizer to a keyboard based on a simple piano model. Intuitive and instantly accessible by musicians, this idea went a long way to popularize synthesizers in modern music.

The precursor to most modern multi-purpose keyboards is the Minimoog, a surprisingly portable (for its time) synthesizer keyboard first released in 1971. The Mini had an important early customer in Wendy Carlos, a composer who went on to provide the distinct soundtracks of films like A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Tron. Eventually, just about every major electronic experimentalist developed a working relationship with Moog, including the famous John Cage.

Robert Moog died in 2005 having lived to see synthesizers revolutionize the way music is made. These days very few recording artists operate without some kind of synthesizer, even if it's just a synthesized piano. Without the developments of Robert A. Moog, perhaps none of this would be possible.