IEEE Life Member Robert (Bob) Moog—a pioneer in the development of electronic music synthesizers—is modest about his 50 years in the industry.

“I never thought of what I did as being all that original,” Moog says. “I put some electronic music modules in a smaller package so musicians could work with it a lot easier.”

A present-day music synthesizer is an electronic musical instrument usually with a piano-like keyboard. In engineering terms, it is a generator of complex, time-varying functions. For a musician, a synthesizer produces a wide variety of tones ranging from mimicking traditional orchestral timbres, such as a cello, to completely new sounds.

Moog was not the first to build a music synthesizer. Before Moog, synthesizers were big and expensive experimental devices found only in research laboratories where work went on to create music electronically. Moog made them smaller and cheaper so that musicians recording in studios or performing on stage could use them. But since that first synthesizer came out in 1965, Moog has been working with musicians to make sure his synthesizers continue to be easy to use.

Moog’s clients and his fellow engineers appreciate all that Moog has done. They disagree with his self-assessment that he didn’t do much.

“Bob designed modular voltage-controlled music synthesizers and combined them with a keyboard in a nice unified system that musicians could afford and readily use,” says Joe

Paradiso, an IEEE member and associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory in Cambridge. Each module controls a different aspect of the synthesizer’s sound, such as pitch, timbre, or volume.

“Until Moog came along, we [keyboard players] were hidden in the background playing a piano. He gave us an instrument whose sound could be made loud enough to cut through concrete and frighten guitarists to death,” says Rick Wakeman of the progressive rock band Yes.

Moog’s synthesizers were chosen by the likes of Mick Jagger, Stevie Wonder, Chick Corea, and hundreds of other musicians. And though Moog may be fairly modest about his work, others have wanted to sing its praises. In celebration of the 50th anniversary of his first company, R.A. Moog Co., a documentary film by director Hans Fjellestad will premier in selected theaters this month. And in May, New York City’s B.B. King’s Bar and Grill hosted Moogfest, a tribute to Moog by artists such as Wakeman and Keith Emerson of the rock group Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Bob Moog [left], in this 1999 photo, has worked with many musicians, including Keith Emerson of the 1970s progressive rock group Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Emerson was one of the first musicians to tour with a Moog Modular System, seen in the background. An early Moog Modular System, from 1965, is shown with its foot pedals [right].

BASEMENT BEGINNINGS  Moog was in the musical instrument business for more than a decade before he introduced his synthesizer. He got into the business in 1954, when he teamed with his father to launch R.A. Moog Co., which sold kits for making theremins. The theremin was invented in 1917 and is said to be the first electronic musical instrument.

Growing up in the Queens section of New York City, Moog was a natural tinkerer and spent many hours in the basement of his home, often fiddling with electronics projects to avoid practicing the piano. As a teenager, Moog built a theremin, which has a pair of antennas—the classic model has one vertical and one horizontal antenna—that can sense the proximity of the player’s hands. The instrument also has a beat-frequency oscillator that generates audio signals, gated by a voltage-controlled amplifier, all housed in a wooden box. Played by moving the hands around the horizontal antenna to control volume and around the vertical antenna to control pitch, the instrument creates a ghostly, wailing sound akin to that of a violin. Musicians such as Pamelia Kurstin and Lydia Kavina—who is a distant relative of the theremin’s Russian inventor—continue to record and perform on the instrument.

Moog attended New York City’s Bronx High School of Science and Columbia University, where he became a student member of the IEEE in 1955. He went on to Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y., to obtain a doctorate in engineering physics in 1965. His approach to engineering was determined at Columbia.

“Early in engineering school, the dean of students said to the new class that an engineer is anybody who can do for two cents what any damn fool can do for three cents,” Moog says. “I realized that was a fundamental truth for me. That’s what I was going to be. I was going to be someone who was going to worry about what things cost.”

Throughout his doctoral studies at Cornell, Moog continued to sell theremins and  theremin kits. It was this work that propelled him into the next phase of his career.

“Making theremins put me in touch with a lot of musicians,” Moog says. “I began making synthesizers because I saw musicians needed them.” His work on synthesizers became an extension of his tinkering with electronics in his basement in Queens.

Moog unveiled the first Moog Modular System at the Audio Engineering Society Convention in October 1964. An analog instrument, it had several components, including a keyboard, oscillators, and filters, that could be hooked together in various ways. Demand for Moogs jumped with the 1968 release of Wendy Carlos’s groundbreaking album, “Switched-on Bach,” which featured classical works performed on a Moog synthesizer. In 1970, Moog introduced the Minimoog, a less expensive and more compact synthesizer than the modular system.

“Part of the reason Moog synthesizers have been so successful is because musicians are not usually all that wealthy,” Moog says. The first Minimoogs sold for $1195. Musicians really took to his products.

“Musicians like my equipment because it sounds good and the controls on the front panel make musical sense,” Moog says. “I think analog instruments in general—our instruments even more so—have a different way of interacting with users than digital electronic instruments.”

Moog left Moog Music in 1977—the company continued to make instruments under the Moog name until 1986—and founded Big Briar in Asheville, N.C., USA, to develop new electronic instruments. Big Briar changed its name to Moog Music Inc. in 2002 after Moog regained ownership of the Moog trademark. Moog’s company currently sells theremins and electronic instruments such as the Moogerfooger, an analog effects device that can impart a wide variety of synthesizer processing to musical instrument sounds. His company also recently released the Moog Piano Bar, a device that sits above the keyboard on a standard acoustic piano and senses how fast or hard the musician plays the keys. The Piano Bar then digitizes the signals and uses them to create a wide range of instrumental timbres, or formats them into a data stream for use with other electronic music equipment.

In 2002, Moog introduced a new version of his classic Minimoog, called the Minimoog Voyager, based on a renewed interest in his old work.

“The Minimoog we’re making now has all the capabilities of the 1970s model, plus it can store and recall settings and has circuits for making new types of sounds,” Moog says. “It’s all in a package that’s the same size as the original Minimoog. Taking inflation into account, it sells for less than it did in the ’70s.”

But the classic 1970s Minimoog, still in demand because of its distinctive “grungy” sound, is sold in vintage music instrument stores and online auctions.

ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL CONVERSION  Bob Moog’s pioneering work in the 1960s opened the door for today’s electronic music industry. Dozens of companies such as Korg, Roland, and Kurzweil manufacture digital synthesizers. Many of these modern digital synthesizers strive to replicate the sound of older, analog instruments, like the Minimoog. But it’s not easy.

“The sound his synthesizers create have their own personality that artists and composers like and is hard to reproduce digitally because the old analog [synthesizers] aren’t very stable,” says Leigh Landy, director of the Music, Technology, and Innovation Research Group at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. “These machines produce warm sounds thanks in part to the way the musician can manipulate the dials and faders. The sounds seem more ‘acoustic’ these days than do the sounds of many synthesizers, which can seem rather clinical.”

But modern electronic instruments are challenging the very concept of musical performance. This is because of a an industry standard known as the musical instrument digital interface (MIDI), which can connect dozens of electronic instruments through a computer. Music is controlled basically by passing messages between different pieces of software, explains MIT’s Paradiso. With MIDI, musicians can take different samples of music—ones they play on a synthesizer, electric guitar, or other electronic instrument—and string them together to create a finished, and unusual, composition. “With a laptop, anybody can sit in their room and make music,” Paradiso says. “And if they’re talented and they can afford the software, they can compose very good computer music.”

Many musicians, such as the techno artists the Chemical Brothers and Moby, do just that. Moby composed much of his 1999 album “Play” on a computer in his bedroom. Paradiso reports that it’s not unusual to go to a concert and see musicians pull out a laptop, using the computer keyboard as a piano keyboard to play the latest piece they created on a computer, and have the sound produced by a synthesizer.

Paradiso sees the future of electronic music as instruments that learn from the musician, rather than the musician learning the instrument.

“I think one of the Holy Grails is the instrument that evolves and changes as you grow as a musician,” Paradiso says. “It works with you to teach you how to play it better.”

Bob Moog, now 70, is moving forward as well and continues to refine his synthesizers and develop new equipment that could, he hopes, be the next Big Thing.

“What I find exciting is knowing what you’re doing could be a new resource for musicians who will use it and say ‘Oh, wow!’”