Dr. Bob Prescribes Switched-On Bach

We pick back up where we left off in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, with the techno-wizard and American maverick-styled inventor Robert Moog’s education.

Robert Moog (1934-2005), Continued

Having graduated from Columbia and Queen’s College in 1957, Moog headed north to Cornell University, where he eventually received a Ph.D. in Engineering Physics in 1965. His fascination with electronic musical instruments remained undimmed. At a time (the early 1960s) when synthesizers were still the room-sized, tube-driven, super-expensive behemoths running on punched paper (like Viktor, aka the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer), Moog’s ambition was to create a synthesizer that would be accessible to all musicians, and not just an elite, academic few. Three parameters drove Moog’s thinking: his synthesizer had to be compact enough to be reasonably portable; it had to have a practical interface, meaning that it would have to be operated by a piano-like keyboard; and it had to be affordable.

As it turned out, Robert Moog was the right man living at the right time, because the technology he required to create a portable, practical, and affordable synthesizer came into being at exactly the time he needed it, a technology called the high-density integrated circuit.

Bear with me for a brief, decidedly non-technical discussion of what was, in the early 1960s, not just a game changing technology but a civilization changing technology!

The Transistor

The technology that made the electronic revolution possible was the transistor, which replaced the comparatively ginormous, power-sucking, heat-generating vacuum tubes with tiny, infinitely faster, cool-running transistors.

(Not that I need to remind you, but I am not an electrical engineer, so I apologize ahead of time for the shamefully rudimentary explanations below, explanations that stretch the limits of my own understanding!)

The transistor was invented at Bell Labs headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in 1947. The initial aim of its inventors was to improve the clarity of telephone calls by creating a smaller and more efficient electrical device – one that consumed less power – than vacuum tubes. In fact, what they did was invent a device that was, for electronics, the “Big Bang”: an invention on par with that of the steam engines that powered the industrial revolution a century before.

A “transistor” is a miniature device that can function three ways. One, it can regulate/control the flow of electric signals: current (the rate of flow of electric charge) and voltage (the difference in electric potential between two points). Two, they can be used to generate and amplify those electric signals. Three, they are used to create electronic switches (or gates) for those electric signals.

The explosive development of transistor technology demonstrates just how unlimited was its commercial potential.

On October 1, 1951, the first commercial production of transistors began at the Western Union plant in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

By the fall of 1952, transistors were being commercially used in telecommunication.

The first commercially produced transistor radio was sold in 1954.

But it was the invention of the integrated circuit (or “monolithic integrated circuit”) in 1959 that truly marked the “great leap forward.”

An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is a set of multiple transistors and other miniaturized electronic components interconnected (“integrated”) with each other and literally “baked” together into a single silicon microchip.

The earliest integrated circuits (ICs) contained tens of transistors per chip. By 1971, high-density ICs could have as many as 10,000 transistors per chip; by 2020, the American artificial intelligence company Cerebras had created what was, at the time, the world’s largest chip with 2.6 trillion transistors.

(I trust we are all familiar with “Moore’s Law,” proposed by the engineer Gordon Moore [1929-2023] in 1965. According to Moore’s Law, the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. Clearly, such exponential miniaturization cannot go on forever, as the limit of miniaturization is the size of the atoms involved. Some say that Moore’s Law reached its limit in 2022; Moore himself predicted it would die in 2025.)

It was, at first, the transistor that allowed Robert Moog to vastly shrink the size of the modular synthesizer and, at the same time, make them relatively affordable.…

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