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Don Buchla (1937–2016)

Donald Buchla, a pioneer of synthesizer and electronic musical instrument design, died 14 September 2016 at the age of 79. Buchla was born in South Gate, California, on 17 April 1937, and, after growing up in California and New Jersey, he received a degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959. At Berkeley, he began working on a series of research projects for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) while also composing electronic music. He became involved with the San Francisco Tape Music Center, and in 1963 two of its affiliates, Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender, commissioned Buchla to develop a new electronic musical instrument. This would become the 100 series Modular Electronic Music System, comprising discrete, interconnecting modules for each of its musical and synthesis functions. These modules included sequencers and touch-sensitive plates for triggering and modifying sounds, and notably omitted a conventional keyboard. Subotnick developed his major electronic work Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) with a 100 series synthesizer, and three of the instruments were built for and installed at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City. Buchla’s instrument also became ingrained in the 1960s California counterculture, providing sounds for Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, the Trips Festival in San Francisco, and Grateful Dead concerts.

Buchla continued to develop new electronic musical instruments over the next five decades. The Buchla 500 series, released in 1971, enabled digital control of its underlying analog architecture. The Music Easel integrated several of Buchla’s 200 series modules into a portable briefcase-like box. The 300 series introduced computer-based sequencing and programming of analog modules. Buchla expanded on these ideas in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the Touché and with the 400 series, forgoing a modular design in both instruments while augmenting their capabilities for control via computer programming. The all-in-one design of the Touché included a conventional keyboard.

In the 1990s, Buchla’s focus turned explicitly towards interaction with digital musical instruments, designing and developing a series of novel MIDI interfaces. The Buchla Thunder assembled a number of his signature capacitive touch-plates into a non-traditional arrangement for controlling an external synthesizer. The Lightning produced MIDI control signals in response to manual gestures, which were tracked by infrared light emitted by a pair of hand-held wands. The Marimba Lumina used a marimba-like surface to detect the movement and strikes of four radio wave-emitting batons wielded by a performer.

Like many of Buchla’s ideas and products, these instruments both drew influence from earlier musical controllers and inspired those to come, shaping the musical cultures of both the avant-garde and the mainstream. Constantly rethinking the conventions of electronic music and pushing his instruments to embrace the distinct musical capabilities enabled by new technologies, Buchla’s contributions to the practice and thought of electronic music resonate to this day. A documentary on Buchla’s life, inventions, and influence, produced by Clarity Films, has been in development since 2013.

Figure 1.

Don Buchla. (Photo: Brandon Daniel, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0.)

DAFx 2016

The 19th International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx) was held 5–9 September 2016 at Brno University of Technology in Brno, Czech Republic. The conference included paper presentations, keynote lectures, and workshops related to a range of audio signal processing, synthesis, and analysis topics, as well as a concert. The keynotes were given by Peter Balazs, who discussed the use of frames in audio processing, Michael Hlatky, who gave an insider’s look at product development at Native Instruments, and Sakari Tervo, who examined parametric room impulse response analysis and synthesis. A set of workshop sessions focused on analog effects modeling, room acoustics analysis, and building hybrid systems from interconnected digital, analog, and mechanical parts. The conference awarded the best paper prize to “Non-Linear Identification of an Electric Guitar Pickup,” by Antonin Novak et al. Additional awards were given to “Directivity Patterns Controlling the Auditory Source Distance,” ”The Fender Bassman 5F6-A Family of...