the synthesizer
Trevor Pinch is Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Professor of Sociology at Cornell University and Co-author of Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer, Harvard University Press, 2002.
It was the sound that first drew me in. What was a police siren doing in a university common room during the annual “Freshers Fair”? The various university clubs had set up their stalls and we the “freshers” (the British name for freshmen or first year students) were prowling around looking to join the clubs of our choice. It was 1970—the tail-end of student radicalism. I, of course, made a beeline for the “Soc Soc” (the Socialist Society) stall. But followed my ears to the source of the siren.
On a nearby table, surrounded by a small group of what we would today call “geeks,” was a space-age machine. It was a contoured wooden box covered in arrays of colored knobs, controlled by a matrix panel of little pins. Sticking out from the box was a small joy stick not unlike a radio-control for a model airplane. The sounds came from the box and seemed to be correlated with the movements of the joy stick, which a young woman was manipulating with great skill. “Welcome to the Imperial College Electronic Music Society” proudly proclaimed a banner. I later learned that the woman was called Lindsay and that the box was a VCS-3 electronic music synthesizer. It was one of the first commercially produced synthesizers, made in London by the EMS company. It was a cheap version of its much more famous American cousin, the Moog synthesizer. Unlike the Moog it had no keyboard and no wires—different sounds were set up by connecting the different modules such as oscillators, amplifiers and filters via the matrix pins.
The geeks were happy for me to play with the box, twiddle some knobs and experiment by putting the matrix pins in different places. I asked, “What do you do in an electronic music society?” “We meet once a week and sit around and listen to electronic music,” I was told. That sounded boring, almost as bad as the Marxist Study Group. But what the heck? I signed up. The sitting around part did turn out to be terminally boring. The music with its repetitive electronic timbres was often mesmerizing, but the atmosphere was all wrong—geeks, loud speakers and a fancy tape recorder all in reverent silence. And worse there was no sign of Lindsay and her synthesizer. That changed a year later when by dint of coincidence Lindsay moved into my communal house with its druggy music scene. We played guitars, bongos, alarm clocks, whatever, and tripped out. We commandeered Lindsay’s synthesizer and played our guitars through it. We made jungle sounds, war sounds, a Vietnam psychedelic rhapsody.
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