Analog Days: The Invention and impact of the Moog synthesizer by Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Harvard University Press, $29.95/拢20.50, ISBN 0674008898 Reviewed by Jon Turney
PHOTOGRAPHERS in the 1960s offered a standard shot of musician-with-Moog synthesiser. The proud owner almost always had one hand on the keyboard, one on the bank of knobs behind it. The keyboard signified musical instrument; the knobs that this was no ordinary instrument. But in those days, it was not yet clear what kind it was going to be.
Bob Moog (rhymes with 鈥渧ogue鈥�) is the central figure in Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco鈥檚 story of how synthesisers evolved. He was the most successful of a handful of innovators, schooled during the electronic hobbyist craze which swept the US in the wake of the Second World War, who then emerged from their basements with assemblies of oscillators, tuners and filters that enabled sound to be made to order. That keyboard was part of his success. Other synthesists, like the West Coast pioneer Don Buchla, could see no point in linking a keyboard to a device for generating electronic tones, and aimed at freeing composers from past sounds and techniques. But Moog鈥檚 customers wanted keyboards, so they got them. Many also wanted preset sounds, too, rather than specifying their own from scratch. In the pop business, the mainstay of the market, they wanted new sounds, but not that new.
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Pinch and Trocco interview the engineers and musicians who fashioned the new devices, and build up a satisfying picture of the one technology that caught the imagination of the 鈥渃ounterculture鈥� of the 1960s and 1970s. In those analog days 鈥� synthesisers nowadays are mostly digital like everything else 鈥� no one really knew what they were doing, so it was worth trying anything. Much of the music was dreadful, though the record sleeves retain a period charm, but some was new and memorable. That, and the fact that even some of the dreadful stuff still sold in shed loads, ensured that synthesised sounds earned a permanent place in the studio and, as Moog and others made them easier to use, on stage.
All this comes across through a nice mix of overview and anecdote, though the blend with the authors鈥� thoughts on the sociology of technology is not always seamless. Still, they have a fascinating story to tell. Today, it is hard to recall what music was like when sounds were restricted to those made by blowing, plucking or hitting things. Music is ubiquitous as never before, and so are synthesised sounds: the two facts go together. So Analog Days is more than a chronicle of an encounter between old arts and new technology: it illuminates a defining technology of our culture.