Moog-Rothenberg Synthesizer

During my time as a research assistant at Cornell’s ReSounds lab, I had the privilege of working on the restoration of one of Robert Moog’s experimental synthesizers. In collaboration with mathematician David Rothenberg, Moog was tasked with creating a 478-key microtonal synthesizer tuned in 31-tone equal temperament, but was unable to accomplish the feat with the technology of the time, given its susceptibility to temperature-related pitch instability. Four decades later, our team, led by Travis Johns, cracked open the crate it was left in and began the process of rebuilding it.

Given the poor state of the original circuitry, we opted to salvage the keyboard and rebuild a pitch-stable synthesizer bank based on a master clock with frequency dividers. Each note could be turned into a sine, square, or triangle wave with analog circuits such as integrators, along with additional effects modules like a chorus. A brand new base was built from wood to house the hundreds of buttons while managing the overwhelming amount of cables.