Buchla
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Buchla & Associates, Inc. is a manufacturer of electronic musical instruments, notably synthesizers and unique MIDI controllers. The 200e Electronic Music Box is currently in production.
[edit] History
The original Buchla Music Box was the brainchild of Don Buchla and came from a commission by composers Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick. First built in 1963, this synthesizer was composed of several "modular" boxes that generated or modified a music event. Each box served a specific function: oscillation, filtering, sample and hold, etc. This would have an effect on the pitch and timbre, amplitude and spacial location of the sound. The idea was to allow musicians and composers to create sounds suited to their own specifications. Previously, one had to utilize either discrete audio generators such as ocillators, filters and ring modulators or via musique concrete, recorded sounds from natural sources. 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 available 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. This convention is evidenced by the omission of a standard musical keyboard on his early instruments, which instead used a series of touch plates which were not necessarily tied to equal-tempered western tuning. He also has different naming conventions than most of the industry: for example, one of his sequencers is called an "Arbitrary Function Generator" or AFG. 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 its uniqueness 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 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.
Some of Buchla's instruments, such as the Music Easel (pictured), use a slightly different method of timbre generation than Moog synthesizers. Moog units 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, and dynamic waveshaping to produce other forms of timbre modulation. Many of Don Buchla's designs, including the Low-Pass Gates (later called Dynamic Managers) contain vactrols, components that mate a light source (LED) with a photo resistor, to give them a very "natural" sound.
