Bob Moog: How he changed music forever
(Read article summary)A Google doodle today honors the legacy of Bob Moog, the creator of a famous line of synthesizers, and the grandfather of electronic music.
A Google doodle today is emblazoned with an interactive synthesizer, an homage to music pioneer Bob Moog, who would have turned 78 today.
So who was Robert "Bob" Moog? A consummate tinkerer, an electronic music pioneer, founder of Moog Music, and the progenitor of a sound that has been described as "assertive, bouncy, exotically wheezy and occasionally explosive."
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Moog was born and raised in New York City. He studied physics at Queens College and electrical engineering at Columbia. In the mid-1960s, as a doctoral candidate in engineering physics at Cornell University, he paired with the composer Herbert Deutsch to develop a voltage-controlled synthesizer module – a portable, relatively-easy-to-use synth that yielded a range of weird and otherworldly noises.
As the Associated Press has pointed out, "other synthesizers were already on the market [at the time], but Moog's stood out for being small, light and versatile." Moreover, Moog's timing was right: Bands such as The Beatles, which would eventually use a Moog machine on the album "Abbey Road," wanted a psychedelic sound, and the Moog could provide it in spades.
