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 […]