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Nice Bob Moog memorial

Polymath Ray Kurzwiel has written a very nice memorial for Robert Moog who passed away last August 21st:

Robert Moog (1934-2005)
I first heard a Moog synthesizer in the mid-1960s when I happened across a TV news segment about the newfangled instrument and its "sci-fi sounds," as the reporter put it. I had just finished a high school computer project on algorithmic music composition, but this was the first time I had heard synthesized sounds. It left me with an inspired feeling that a threshold had been crossed.

Robert Moog, (the name rhymes with vogue) died August 21 at age 71, but his impact on music was permanent and profound. Through the end of the 19th century, music had been made entirely from found and crafted implements - vibrating strings, resonant boxes and tubes - and of course the human voice. In the 20th century, musical devices went beyond such natural ones (which were sometimes electrically amplified) to fully embrace high technology in the form of electronic music synthesis. The first synthesizers appeared in the early 1900s, but they were obscure experiments until Moog brought them into the mainstream.

The Bob Moog I knew, however, wasn't focused on his pivotal role in music history. He was motivated by his love for invention, for applying electronics to music, and for interacting with the musicians who used his technology. He had a rare combination of talents: an intuition for signal processing and an equally clear sense of the language of music.

That last paragraph captures Bob's spirit very well. I had the great pleasure of meeting him a few times and talking to him on the phone once (I had called his company with a technical question and he picked up the phone). Ray is no slouch either. I have several of his digital synthesizers and how these came about is very interesting... Ray's first major business was building reading systems for the Blind. You would lay your printed material down on a flatbed scanner and a synthesized voice would tell you to rotate it to the right or left. When it was positioned correctly, it would start to scan and read out loud to you. The quality of the synthesized voice was very good -- it had a slight "head cold" quality to it but otherwise was very human sounding. These machines were fairly expensive (scanners were not sold at Wal-Mart then and the CPU requirements specified a mini-mainframe) so it was mostly Libraries and Universities that had them. A few well-off blind people bought them and one of these people was Stevie Wonder. (His first customer actually.) Stevie was impressed with the quality of the speech synthesis and asked Ray if the machine could synthesize musical instruments as well. Proverbial A-Ha! moment... Posted by DaveH at November 5, 2005 8:51 PM