2023-12-26 05:00:09
“Mr. Moog, don’t you feel guilty?” “, asserts the journalist to the inventor of the modern synthesizer, who came to present his prototype at the University of Toronto in 1964. Forty years later, Robert Moog has fond memories of this incident, which he relates in a documentary devoted to its machines. “The very first feedback I was given was [qu’un synthétiseur] it wasn’t natural. »
To understand the aggressiveness of the critics, we must appreciate how much the sounds of the Moog could be destabilizing at the time, like its appearance of an old telephone switchboard to which a keyboard had been connected by mistake. When you turn the knob of its oscillator, the machine generates increasingly short waves: the sound rises in the towers, and you think you hear the metallic noise of an airplane engine, soon transforming into a high-pitched siren.
Portrait of American inventor Robert Moog, seated in front of one of the first modular Moog synthesizers, in 1970. JACK ROBINSON / GETTY IMAGES
This is just a taste: the Moog can string together acoustic surprises for hours, its forest of rotary knobs making it an inexhaustible sound laboratory. “It is the first instrument to control, without musical prerequisites, all of the parameters of sound generation,” judge Mikael Dürrmeier, director of research and curation at the Swiss Museum and Center for Electronic Musical Instruments, Fribourg. By choosing, for example, the shape of the waves, the speed with which they unfold, or even by modeling their brilliance at the moment when they fade, the Moog allows you to sculpt your own sounds, rather than producing a unique, characteristic sound, like a violin or a piano would do.
Sound break
The surprise is not total: the Moog is not the first instrument to sound “synthetic”. For example, we can hear one of its ancestors, the ondioline, in the soundtracks of Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960) or The Cow and the Prisoner (Henri Verneuil, 1959), or in songs like The Soul of Poets by Charles Trenet (1951). But, very often, their colors approach acoustic instruments, and they are played with a familiar expressiveness. The Moog, for its part, harbors the seeds of a sonic rupture.
However, it will take a long time for popular music groups to realize this. In the mid-1960s, pre-orders came in slowly, coming mainly from experimental composers or advertisers interested in the synthesizer’s ability to capture attention. Robert Moog listen to their advice to finalize its first commercial model, the 1C, launched in 1967.
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