Robert Moog has died after suffering from a cancer of the brain.

Well, the man left a cultural legacy that will remain basicly forever. How many of us can even hope for that.

(is it basicly or basically?)

It's 'basically', but if you can persuade enough people to use the alternative spelling who knows :-).

Yes, that shall be my mission. Maybe I too can leave my mark on this world ere I depart.


Basicly

Another legend down. Is Don Buchla still around? How about Robert Pearlman?

Saw that. Very sad. Everyone should go buy a moog record in his honor:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000055ZE1/qid=1124733448/sr=8-4/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i4_xgl15/002-6287859-9847241?v=glance&s=music&n=507846

I actually own a copy of "Best Of Moog" -- It's really really dated, but it's all historic music that people should know about.

Just think, when Hot Butter came out with Popcorn (I remember it being played on the AM band), they were pioneers, as radical in their time as the rap guys were in the 80's.

Who remembers that Wendy Carlos (famous for "Switched on Bach") used to be Walter Carlos? Like I said, really radical for the time, in more ways than one.

example sez : "Who remembers that Wendy Carlos (famous for "Switched on Bach") used to be Walter Carlos?"

Heck yes. I think she was Walter back when Switched on Bach came out, actually.

<nerd>
In order to do most of the music for Switched On Bach, she had to generate each note separately on individual pieces of tape, then physically splice the pieces of tape together in the right order, with the right spacing, to create the melodies. Damn hard to begin with, but when you're trying to work from a -score- ... ouch.
</nerd>

<double-nerd>
She also created some of the greatest early electronic movie scores. The score from Tron? The Shining? The scary sped-up version of Beethoven's Ninth in A Clockwork Orange? All her.
</double-nerd>

"<nerd>...</nerd>"

There was a fascinating documentary on BBC3 a while back about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop with lots of footage of people doing all that tape splicing business; they used to cobble together crazy equipment, they'd have loops of tape so long that they went out of one door of the workshop, up the corridor, and back in through the other door, and the amount of painstaking work that went into it was just mindblowing.

Mat : If you're interested in the best fundamentals of oldschool synthesis (most of which are still intensely applicable today), Wendy Carlos did an audio lecture called "Secrets of Synthesis" which is just great. It's full of her own audio examples, and is one of the best intros to synthesis out there (though there some content that only serious professional musicians would ever be into).

In either the late 60's or early 70's Michael Burke had a technology programme in prime time on the BBC, a lot of perceptual science, day to day physics and some extraordinary demonstrations. A kind of Tomorrows World Plus.

One of them them was on the psychology of the mind and included a Moog wired up to a young woman in much the same way as you're wired up to an EEG machine (which puts it after 1968 as that was when I first had an EEG exam).

After some raising of anticipation and cutting back and forth they switched the output of the Moog on and she did seem to be able to control the Moog to some degree in a kind of biofeedback way.

Who the fuck is he?

Away and play on your Yamaha, kiddy.

Actually, Wendy did tape splicing to fix wrong notes rather than risk being able to accurately pucnh in and out for a single note. She did not record individual notes on separate pieces of tape and then assemble them, excepting the very occasional notes that were there to fix the wrong notes.

Scott : Then that makes me very sad, if it's true. Anyone got an authoritative source to refer to?

Oh, you meant Michael Burke, Flasher_T, not Robert Moog?

Michael Burke was, still is, a journalist that specialised in scientific journalism back when big science was sexy and everyone hung on scientists every word, the time of Moon missions and wondering if the Lander would drown in dust. Whereas nowadays its technologists and scientists get short shrift.

He came to fame on Tomorrow's World, the BBC's weekly series on technological advances, a product centred programme.

At the same time he was on all the BBC Space specials, of which there seemed to be one every week at that time, I think he was also involved in explaining how the coal tip at Aberfan collapsed and killed most of a primary school.

He left the BBC proper to get US money and make specials, which he sold also to the BBC, on specific science topics and that's the series I was remembering with the Moog and EEG connections.

His US claim to fame is probably the series Connections where he took technological advances, and social advances and showed how they produced some of the shifts and schisms of history, for instance the use of the stirrup by Norman knights compared to the Saxons.

I dug my moog out of the cupboard today and had a play around. I haven't touched it for yonks, but I thought it was kind of appropriate. From what i've read of him, I think he'd be happy about that.

I'm not sure why it would make you sad?? Wendy has discussed her production methods in several interviews in Keyboard magazine over the years, and she also talks about it on her website.

"the amount of painstaking work that went into it was just mindblowing."

That's not work. That's pure joy.

Gee I remember Switched On Bach. This background is for the age challenged:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg18524921.400

BTW Peter Vogel's working on something I was musing on. My system would only work if a DSP could be trained to note the presence of the station logo in the corner of the TV screen and skip/mute when the logo isn't there on the grounds that I've never seen the logo on top of paid ads. Simple really. And probably dumb. No doubt this will be much more robust:

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/30/interviews_with_elec.html

Sorry to distract from the wake.

>> His US claim to fame is probably the series Connections where he took technological advances, <<

I think you mean James Burke ?? Author of "Connections" and "The Day The Universe Changed"?

Another group of artists who were in the forefront of electronic music were Jean Michel Jarre and Kraftwerk.

According to Wolfgang Fl&#252;r's biography (the original percussionist for Kraftwerk) they had to invent nearly all of their instruments, as the commercial products of the time (the Mellotron, etc) just weren't giving them what they wanted. They also invented the trigger for electronic percussion, something that didn't hit the mainstream until bands like Thompson Twins used them in the 1980's.

All his closest friends called him Michael.

Harrumph, people just want accuracy these days, no feeling at all.

Of course Michael Buerk entertains us all with his newsreading and interesting views on women:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/4155228.stm

That's no doubt why Michael stuck in the throat and was vomited out before the true James cames out.

Ahh. Michael Buerk (sp?) and James Burke are different people. Both are/were science reporters that worked at the Beeb for a while during the era of "big science", but one seems to have an Amazon complex, and one does not.

I really wish they'd repeat "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed". I may be remembering through rose-tinted 7-dimensional vectors -- it's been a long time since they were last on -- but as a kid they made a pretty big impact on me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were one of the things the BBC threw away when they went on their crazy "who's going to watch this again?" purge, but I have a vague hope that they'll eventually surface in the "download loads of BBC stuff" project.

He's involved in something called Knowledge-Web now, a kind of wiki/Connections for Educators, it seems to be making the mistake of not being accessible to everybody and whilst wikipedia isn't a direct competitor its hard to get mindshare with teachers.

All three seasons of Connections are available on DVD. A bit pricey at $450 for the whole set, but available.

$450? Crapola! That's about $15 an episode. I'm not *that* keen to see it again. :)

Amazon has Connections 2 & 3 for $150 and $135 apiece. Still not cheap, but better.

Netflix has Connections 2 and 3, full sets (why not the first series? Not sure). I'm going to have to put these in my queue.