Did you have a particular kind of music in mind when you built the synthesiser?

[MOOG] I had no hopes for any particular music. My reward for designing and building this equipment was the opportunity to work with creative musicians. Every one was different. Every one had a different idea. All that was fascinating and rewarding to me. What inspires me is not so much the music as the opportunity to interact with composers. I think that has driven everything I’ve done. My training as an engineer has enabled me to design the stuff, but the reason I do it is not to make music but for the opportunity to work with musicians.

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How did you come to invent sampling?

[VOGEL] I had this random idea late one night, probably in 1978. I thought that if we took a sample of an instrument and had a look at the harmonics we could get an idea of how to synthesise it. We were already making interesting sounds but we were still a long way from getting it to sound like a real instrument, like a piano or a trumpet. So I hooked an analogue-to-digital converter up to the radio and sampled maybe a second of some piano piece. Then I wondered how it would sound if I played it back without doing anything. So I played it back at different pitches and it sounded remarkably like a piano, a real piano. This had never been done before.

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