Though
ubiquitous today, available as a single microchip and found in any
electronic device requiring sound, the synthesizer when it first
appeared was truly revolutionary. Something radically new--an
extraordinary rarity in musical culture--it was an instrument that used a
genuinely new source of sound: electronics. 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 for the first time 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 heady 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 happenings.
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 critical chapter
of our cultural history.
Trevor Pinch (Autor), Frank Trocco (Autor)
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