Analog Days

The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer

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by Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco

Harvard University Press

Due/Published October 2004, 384 pages, paper

ISBN 0674016173

New in paper (F04)

Though available as a single microchip today and found in any electronic device requiring sound, the synthesizer when it first appeared was truly revolutionary. How this came to be--how an engineering student at Cornell and an avant-garde musician working out of a storefront in California set this revolution in motion--is the story told in Analog Days, a book that explores the invention of the synthesizer and its impact on popular culture.

The authors take us back to the days of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the technology was analog, the synthesizer was an experimental instrument, and synthesizer concerts could and did turn into events that were quite special. Interviews with the pioneers who determined what the synthesizer would be and how it would be used--from inventors Robert Moog and Don Buchla to musicians like Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, and Keith Emerson--recapture their visions of the future of electronic music and a new world of sound.

Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in Switched-On Bach, from its contribution to the San Francisco psychedelic sound, to its wholesale adoption by the worlds of film and advertising, Analog Days conveys the excitement, uncertainties, and unexpected consequences of a new technology that would provide the soundtrack for a new chapter of our cultural history.