Don Buchla, Inventor, Composer and Electronic Music Maverick, Dies at 79

By JON PARELESSEPT. 17, 2016

Don Buchla, surrounded by instruments, in an undated photo. Buchla.com

Don Buchla, a pioneer and maverick of electronic music who had a lifelong fascination with the ways that humans, technology and sounds interact, died on Wednesday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 79.

His death was confirmed by his son, Ezra, who said the cause was complications of cancer.

Mr. Buchla was an instrument builder, musician and composer. He conceived his instruments, including a voltage-controlled modular synthesizer, as tools for creating previously unheard sounds and gave them names like the Music Easel, Thunder or simply the Buchla Box.

His inventions were prized for the flexibility and richness of the sounds they produced and the possibilities they suggested. Mr. Buchla disliked the term “synthesizer,” which suggested to him a synthetic imitation of existing sounds.

He was best known for the many devices he designed for his own company, Buchla & Associates. But in a far-ranging career, he also helped build (and sometimes ran) the Grateful Dead’s sound system in the 1960s, worked on NASA projects and devised early transistorized hearing aids and navigation devices for the blind.

At least one sound from a Buchla instrument has been heard worldwide: the “pop and pour” sound created by the composer Suzanne Ciani and used in countless Coca-Cola advertisements.

In the 1960s, Mr. Buchla’s instruments represented what became known as the West Coast philosophy of electronic music: more experimental and less commercial, breaking away from tradition and virtuosity.

“I always figured that if I made something that was too popular, that I was doing something wrong and had best move on,” Mr. Buchla told Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, the authors of “Analog Days: The Inven...hesizer” (2002). “And I’ve always enjoyed being on the edge.”

In the early ’60s, the better-known Robert Moog, who died in 2005, and Mr. Buchla arrived independently at the idea of the voltage-controlled modular synthesizer: an instrument assembled from various modules that controlled one another’s voltages to generate and shape sounds. Voltages could control pitch, volume, attack, timbre, speed and other parameters, interacting in complex ways.

Mr. Buchla began designing his first instrument in 1963, but it was not completed until 1965. The first Moog prototype was unveiled in 1964.

On the East Coast, Mr. Moog built synthesizers that could be played from a keyboard, a configuration that working musicians found familiar and practical. Mr. Buchla, in San Francisco, wanted instruments that were not necessarily tied to Western scales or existing keyboard techniques. To encourage unconventional thinking, his early instruments deliberately omitted a keyboard.

“A keyboard is dictatorial,” he said. “When you’ve got a black-and-white keyboard, it’s hard to play anything but keyboard music.”

While the modules of Moog synthesizers had straightforward names out of electrical engineering — oscillators to generate tones, filters to modify them — Mr. Buchla’s instruments had modules with more colorful names, like Multiple Arbitrary Function Generator, Quad Dynamics Manager and, for his random-voltage noise generator, Source of Uncertainty.

“I have always been outside, and I’ve chosen to remain there,” he said in a 1983 interview with Polyphony magazine. “I’ve been an experimentalist since really early childhood.”

Mr. Buchla was born in South Gate, Calif., on April 17, 1937, and grew up in that state and in New Jersey. He studied piano and, discovering a knack for electronics, began building radio sets. He studied astronomy, music and physiology at the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated as a physics major in 1959.

While at Berkeley, where he stayed for postgraduate study, he worked on NASA projects, including controls for the Gemini space capsule. He also developed a laser-based navigational aid for the blind for RCA and the Veterans Administration in the early 1960s. And he made music, building string instruments and sound sculptures. His composition “Cicada Music” (1963) calls for “approximately 2,500 six-legged performers.”

Don Buchla in 1999 with one of his inventions, the Marimba Lumina. Susanne Kaspar

Mr. Buchla grew interested in musique concrète, an experimental technique using recording tape to manipulate sounds, and worked at the San Francisco Tape Music Center as both a composer and a technician. In 1965, with $500 from a Rockefeller Foundation grant made to the Tape Music Center, the composers Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender commissioned Mr. Buchla to build his first voltage-controlled instrument, the original Buchla Box.

It included a module that would transform both avant-garde and popular music. Called a sequencer, it vastly expanded the concept and functionality of a tape loop by generating and repeating a chosen series of voltages, enabling it to control a recurring melody, a rhythm track or other musical elements. It would become an essential tool of electronic dance music.

Mr. Subotnick used a Buchla Series 100 Modular Electronic Music System to create “Silver Apples of the Moon,” a 1968 album commissioned by Nonesuch Records. The composer Vladimir Ussachevsky ordered three for the studios of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (now the Computer Music Center at Columbia University). That order led Mr. Buchla to start his instrument factory in a Berkeley storefront so small that the instruments were often assembled out on the sidewalk.

The Buchla Box also supplied sound for the writer Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, the freewheeling multimedia happenings at which attendees, including Mr. Buchla, used LSD. Mr. Buchla was at the electronic controls for sound and visuals at the Trips Festival in San Francisco in 1966, a pinnacle of the psychedelic era. In his book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968), Tom Wolfe wrote about the “Buchla electronic music machine screaming like a logical lunatic.”

After building part of the Grateful Dead’s sound system in the 1960s, he sometimes mixed the band’s live shows, adding electronic sounds from his Buchla Box.

CBS licensed Mr. Buchla’s designs in 1969 for a musical-instrument division it owned at the time, but the partnership did not last; Mr. Buchla’s instruments were not geared toward a mass market. He returned to developing and manufacturing instruments on his own.

As the 1970s began, he saw possibilities in minicomputers, inventing hybrid digital-analog electronic instruments, beginning with his 200 series Electronic Music Box.

Mr. Buchla was the technical director, from 1970 to 1971, at the California Institute of the Arts, designing both musical equipment and computer languages for music composition. As technical director of the Electric Symphony during that period, he used electronics to capture and extend the sounds of orchestral instruments. He introduced his portable, programmable Music Easel in 1973 and started the Electric Weasel Ensemble, a quintet of Music Easel players.

He also built electronic music studios for educational institutions, including Stony Brook University on Long Island and the Norwegian Center for Electronic Music in Oslo. By the end of the 1970s, he had invented a computer-based keyboard instrument, the Touché, and an electronic cello interface. His 1982 Buchla 400 Series included a video display.

Mr. Buchla was a consultant to the contemporary music organization Ircam (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music) in France, and he received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to design instruments and write music for a 100-piece electronic orchestra.

During the 1990s, he turned to designing MIDI controllers, alternatives to keyboards that send signals from a physical performance to a synthesizer. One controller, the Thunder, had 50 touch-sensitive plates that responded to contact, pressure and location; another, the Lightning, had wands responding to motion and gesture. And the Marimba Lumina, played with mallets, responded to velocity, position and contact; each of its four mallets could be assigned its own sound.

Mr. Buchla consulted for other instrument companies, including Oberheim, for which he designed the 1995 Oberheim OB-Mx, and Moog, which manufactured his 2002 PianoBar, which employed sensors placed on a piano’s keys and pedals to translate a pianist’s performance into MIDI signals.

As the 21st century began, there was a surge of interest in modular analog synthesizers — a backlash against predictable, sterile digital sounds. Mr. Buchla revisited his 200 series from the 1970s, updating it as the 200e.

Yet his boutique-scale, luxury-priced business ran into financial problems, and in 2012, as Mr. Buchla struggled with cancer, he sold the company to Audio Supermarket, which changed its name to Buchla Electronic Musical Instruments and made Mr. Buchla its chief technical officer, only to fire him in 2013.

Mr. Buchla had a stroke in 2014. In 2015, he sued Buchla Electronic M...nstruments to regain control of the company, contending that he had not been fully paid for the sale, that he was terminated without good cause and that the company had failed to “use reasonable business efforts to reach sales targets.” The case went to arbitration in July 2015 and reached a confidential resolution this year.

Besides his son, who is also a musician, Mr. Buchla is survived by his wife, Anne-Marie Bonnel; two daughters, Jeannine Serbanich and Erin Buchla; and two grandchildren.