“Robert Moog, the creator of the electronic music synthesizer that bears his name … died on Sunday at his home in Asheville, N.C.” Moog invented practical monophonic and (later) polyphonic analog synthesizers, using keyboards and other controllers. The New York Times has a good article on him.

Back in the 1970s, when synthesizers were developing rapidly, though still horribly expensive, there seemed to be a lot of people tinkering with the technology. Digital technology was still a ways off. There was a company in Oklahoma, I think, called PAIA Electronics, which offered kits you built yourself, which was the only way I could afford any of that. I built a simple monophonic kit they had, called the Gnome, I believe, as well as a small organ to play it. The synthesizer sounded pretty good, really, at home, but I had so much trouble with it whenever we took it somewhere else that I finally set it aside.

My point really is that there was a lot of innovation in instruments at that time, and I was really expecting all sorts of new musical instruments to emerge during the 1980s, as digital supplanted analog. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell (though I’m not really at all active in music nowadays), the hobbyist sort of hardware experimentation really declined once digital arrived, just as Heathkit-type electronic kit building did.

I really believe that there are still a lot of neat musical instruments, especially controllers, based on synthesizer technology that are yet to be invented. I was working on a controller design myself before I started college, and still haven’t seen anything like it yet.

I wonder if we’ll see another era of widespread hobbyist electronic innovation again, like the 1970s. Perhaps O’Reilly’s new Make: publication may be a precursor of that.