Buchla
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Buchla & Associates is a manufacturer of electronic musical instruments, notably synthesizers. The 200e Electronic Music Box is currently in production.
The original Buchla Music Box was the brainchild of composers Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick, and they hired electrical engineer Don Buchla to design and build it. First built in 1963, this Synthesizer was the first one that could be played by a typical musician. It was composed of several "modular" boxes that modified or generated a tone. Each box served a specific function: oscillation, filtering, delay, sample and hold, etc. This would have an effect on the pitch and timbre of the sound. The idea was to allow musicians and composers to create sounds suited to their own specifications. Previously, one had to utilize the musique concrete method of tape loops. Although it was a fresh and exciting idea and an excellent way to get new sounds, this was very time-consuming and arduous. The Buchla Box allowed musicians to bend and manipulate sound all in one device. This would lead to the many forms of electronic music we have today.
The Buchla Modular Synthesizer was commissioned specifically by Subotnick for use on his first major electronic work Silver Apples Of The Moon. He gave Don Buchla ideas and specifications for the boxes and what they should do. Along with Robert Moog's Moog synthesizer, it would go on the revolutionize the way music and sound is made.
Buchla tends to not refer to his instruments as synthesizers, as he feels that name gives the impression of imitating existing sounds/instruments. His intent is to make instruments for creating new sounds. He also has different naming conventions than most of the industry, for example, his sequencer is called an "Arbitrary Function Generator". These differences run deeper than nomenclature, though. The Multiple Arbitrary Function Generator (or MARF) goes well beyond what a typical sequencer is capable of. Another module that sometimes gets critiqued for unique naming is the Source of Uncertainty (or SoU). The Source of Uncertainty provides many different flavors of randomness, from noise of different colors, to a LFO-like fluctuating random voltage, and a couple forms of stepped voltage, all of this deliciously voltage controllable. The Source of Uncertainty goes well beyond a noise and random module in a typical synthesizer.
It is also important to note that Don Buchla and Robert Moog simultaneously invented the modular synthesizer in 1963, Moog in New York and Buchla in San Francisco. While there had been previous synthesizer experiments, Moog and Buchla's major developments that made the synthesizer portable and flexible was that of using control voltage to manipulate the various elements of the circuits.
Buchla instruments use a slightly different method of timbre generation than Moog's machines. Moogs use simple oscillators and rely heavily on filtering with 24db resonant low pass filters, while Buchlas are geared toward using complex oscillators using frequency modulation, amplitude modulation, dynamic waveshaping, and other forms of timbre modulation to come up with its variety of sounds. The Buchla low-pass gates contain vactrols, components that mate a light source with a sensor, to give them a very "natural" sound. The two different avenues of synthesis came to be known as "East Coast" (subtractive, like Moog), and "West Coast" (Buchla style) synthesis. The West Coast school also places more emphasis on control voltage generation and modification than the East Coast school.
