3 Electronic Maestros Interviewed

thesixthreplicant writes "New Scientist interviews 3 pioneers of electronic music: Bob Moog, the inventor of the first commercial synthesiser, the Moog; Australian Peter Vogel, creator of the first electronic sampler, the Fairlight (16 bit sampling in 1979!); and Dave Smith, the father of MIDI."

I have to admire this

[Timesprout]

Its one of the few occasions when computing and math truly do come together

Re:Pioneers?

[dangitman]

Was I the only one expecting the article to be about the genre which Kraftwerk is hailed as a pioneer of?

Karftwerk are great, and indeed defined the style of the electronic music genre. Indeed, Kraftwerk's sound is still heard in modern electronic music, over 30 years later. Wendy (Walter) Carlos was also a key contributor to composing electronic music - but she relied on Robert Moog's technology to make her music. All decent electronic artists acknowledge the work of the engineers and scientists who built the equipment that bands like Kraftwerk used. After all, without these tools, research and instruments, how would the artists be able to make the music? Also, for a more modern example think of Robin Whittle - who modified synthesizers for tons of modern electronic artists - yet is not a musician or composer hmself.

I have owned several Moog synthesizers, and IMO, Moog is one of the people most responsible for bringing us the way we use electronic instruments in practice. The Moog is still an awesome synthesizer to use.

Remember those .mod files?

[Douglas Simmons]

Back in the day when bandwidth was an issue, there was a format that was half midi half sound samples. The sound was convincing (ie it didn't sound like a cheap keyboard) considering the size and it was a good compromise between a file containing essentially sheet music and a straight-up 50 meg wave file. Whoever came up with that, high five.

Re:The Synthesizer

[Aneurysm]

Actually, there's nothing wrong with it [wordreference.com]. My guess is that the version omitting the z is the English version and the one with the z is the American, as in Britain we tend to use the s rather than the z in words similar to this, ie desensitise, moralise, formalise.

Re:Luddites!

[northcat]

This is not about Electronic Music, the genre. This is about music in electronic form. This has nothing to do with the genre.

Re:Delia Derbyshire - Dr. Who.

[radarsat1]

it's not a competition.. he's just mentioning another very influencial name here.

Derbyshire did a lot of really interesting (and yes, pioneering) studio work, involving manipulating taped sine waves and all sorts of weird stuff. Chill out. Almost everyone who was working on electronic music in those days was part of inventing the tools to do so. It's not like she sat down for 5 minutes with Reason.

Re:Pioneers?

[Anonymous Coward]

There were others using electronic instruments well before kraftwerk, but I'd be hard pressed to name one who so deeply absorbed the technology. Kraftwerk was interesting because of how purely electronic they were. Even their vocals were heavily vocoded robot sounding, as if the entire album was being played by computers.

The other artists you list were certainly also breaking new ground (with the exception of Duran Duran), but I really wouldn't credit any of them with pushing electronic sounds so far. Eno probably came closest, but even he still had "regular" instruments heavily featured.

Simple put, Kraftwerk showed you could make music using just computers. To this day when I hear most modern techno I hear hints of Kraftwerk.

Re:Appropriate

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the 'problems' with this, the reason it doesn't happen all that much, is because most musicians and/or producers are artists. They think like artists and behave like artists. If they could, they'd make their live performances sound more like the CDs, not the other way around.

A lot of songs are actually written in the studio during the recording period .. Somebody has some ideas for lyrics, somebody thinks they've got something that will go well with it, and so on .. the addition of 'effects' is a live part of the recording process.

Bands on low budgets or who've never recorded before usually come in with whole songs, ready to go .. this can be a minor nightmare for the recording technician depending on the quality of the players, the instruments being used, and the studio .. but in general it's what creates the "I like their old stuff better than their new stuff" phenomenon..

When they've got a budget, a contract to make an album, or they're a band signed to a label which has affiliations with the studio, they usually don't come in with much at all .. They've often been touring until the week before, promoting their previous album. They come in with scraps of lyrics, they try to remember a few riffs they thought of one night .. They have no choice but to use the recording process as an integral part of the music creation .. The mixing and effects are another instrument in the band.

Re:Remember those .mod files?

[Explo]

The father of the .mod files is Karsten Obarski [wikipedia.org] (I can still remember listening the Sleepwalk and other pretty much very first mods, how damn fine they sounded those days around '87...)

As an old-time Amiga fan, I'll have to note that there were also trackers (as the .mod and friends composing programs were/are known) that could play more than 4 sounds on the basic Amiga 500 sound hardware since late 80's. OctaMED [octamed.co.uk] (these days pretty much Windows only, but older Amiga versions do exist), Digibooster Pro and Octalzyer are good examples of these.

film out

[rishistar]

This comes up as a slashdot story the day after I get info about a Moog film [imdb.com] being shown at my local cinema.