[Omah]

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/05...google-doodle/

Wow, Google have really outdone themselves with today’s doodle (currently live in countries where it’s already May 23rd). We’ve had plenty of great ones before featuring great writers, artist, scientists and, er, snowflakes, but this one features some of the best interactivity I can remember in a while. Today would have been the 78th birthday of Robert Moog, and the doodle honours him with a fully playable version of his famous synthesiser, complete with lots of knobs to twiddle and tweak the sounds just like the real thing.

You can play the keyboard using the number and/or QWERTY keys on your actual keyboard and use the cursor arrows to move between and adjust the Mixer, Oscillators, Filters and Envelope to make all sorts of crazy squelchy synth sounds. And there’s more – that funny looking thing to the right of the Moog is a “Tape Recorder” (look it up on wikipeadia) and if you hit the red button you can record a short section of your masterpiece, then play it back and record another three tracks.



Bob Moog, 1934 - 2005, courtesy moogmusic.com
Moog was born in New York in 1934 and was building and selling Theremins with his father from 1954 onwards. In 1963 he designed and built his first modular synthesizer with voltage-controlled oscillators and amplifiers, and other controllers that turned sounds on or off and could change their pitch and modulation rates. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Engineering Physics from Cornell in 1965 and shortly after founded a company to start selling his Moog Modular Synthesizers.

You will have heard the sound of Moog synths in pretty much every form of music around since the 60s – from movie soundtracks such as Midnight Cowboy, to artists such as Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder, right the way through to Heavy Metal rockers like Ozzy Osbourne, and any self-respecting electronic musician today will have at least one Moog in their arsenal of vintage synths.