Restored 478-key, 31-tone Moog synthesizer from 1968 sounds beautifully bizarre

Mathematician and early AI theorist David Rothenberg was fascinated by pattern-recognition algorithms. By 1968, he’d already performed a lot of work in missile trajectories (as one did again then), speech, and accounting, however he had one other esoteric space he needed to discover: the harmonic scale, as heard by people. With sufficient circuits and keys, you can carve up the standard music octave from 12 tones into 31 and make every kind of between-tone tunes.

Happily, he had cash from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and he additionally knew simply the particular person to construct this theoretical keyboard: Robert Moog, a latest graduate from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who was simply beginning to work towards a completely realized Moog Music.

The plans known as for a 478-key keyboard, an analog synthesizer, a financial institution of oscillators, and an impossibly intricate collection of circuits between them. Moog “took his time on this,” based on Travis Johns, tutorial technologist at Cornell. He ultimately delivers a one-octave prototype made from “Sixties-era, World-War-II-surplus know-how.” Rothenberg held onto the keyboard piece, hoping to in the future end it, till his demise in 2018. His widow, Suhasini Sankaran, donated the package to Cornell in 2022.

Because of that noble garage-cleaning, there now exists a completed machine, one which has had work composed and carried out upon it: the Moog-Rothenberg Keyboard.

The mission did not begin till February 2023, partly due to the intimidating nature of engaged on a one-of-a-kind early synth prototype. “I’d hate to unsolder one thing that was soldered 50 years in the past by Robert Moog,” Johns says within the video.

Johns and his college students and workers at Cornell sought to honor the unique intent and schematics of the machine however not ignore the advantages of recent tech. Programmable micro-controllers had been used to divide up an 8 MHz clock sign, creating circuits with a number of octaves of the identical be aware. Those controllers had been then wired, laboriously, to the suitable keys.

As Johns notes, it is laborious to categorize the synthesizer now as the unique object, a re-creation, or a “playable facsimile” of a deliberate machine. It’s additionally a very unusual instrument. His workforce adopted each mathematical and electrical element of the unique plans however discovered that the keyboard took on “a lifetime of its personal,” creating uncommon timbres, resonances, and even volumes as soundwaves synchronized and fell away. This is, in fact, the form of factor Rothenberg initially employed Moog to make potential.

By October, the 31-tone synth was able to play some music. Cornell professors Xak Bjerken and Elizabeth Ogonek carried out and composed for it, respectively, they usually had been joined by members of Cornell’s EZRA quartet, themselves no stranger to unusual devices and new kinds. Bjerken described his set as “bluegrass meets experimental improvisation.”

You can actually hear the experimental come via in bits of the efficiency captured by Cornell. Ogonek manually managed the instrument’s filters throughout the live performance to create sustained tones. It requires greater than two fingers to regulate the output of 478 keys. The synthesizer now resides in Cornell’s Lincoln Hall for the Department of Music.