The Guardian has published an interesting article by Don Paterson, entitled My hero Bob Moog:

More than any 20th-century inventor you could name, Moog warmed up the wires and humanised the machine. He was a spiritual man who believed in nothing but material, though he treated matter as a form of energy (which of course it is), one we barely understand. As for his idea that all matter has a residual consciousness . . . well – beyond the hard-won lesson that if you don’t love machines, they won’t love you back – I’m sceptical.

But not only did Moog elaborate this idea with great intellectual sophistication (his wife was a professor in the philosophy of religion), he set about proving it, up to his elbows in Bessel functions and Fourier transforms and circuitboards. His respect for material allowed him to draw the most beautiful sounds out of the ether; in doing so, Bob Moog simply increased the human expressive range. Some toolmaker.

Image of Bob Moog signing Stephi’s rubber duck via BigCityMusic