The Minimoog employs a few different methods of indicating status to the user. “The design should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable amount of time.”²
The Minimoog’s simplified knobs and signage provided users a clearer roadmap of where they were in their sound synthesis journey. No longer did users have to find their way through a tangle of wires with unclear status indications. In this process of stripping sound synthesis down to switches and potentiometers is where another one of the Minimoog’s strengths lies. defines the Paradox of Choice as, “an observation that having many options to choose from can cause people to stress and problematize decision-making.”⁵ In the Minimoog’s case, its minimalist design was not simply a matter of aesthetic but also of improved user experience. “This instrument was a hardwired subset of the large modular systems available before ” wrote Joseph Paradiso comparing the Minimoog to its modular predecessors.⁴ Paradiso continues to observe that, unlike modular synthesizers, “signal routing between components was controlled entirely by a set of switches and potentiometers.”⁴ This contrast between the modular design’s endless possibility for exploration and the Minimoog’s more simplified design is a helpful illustration of analysis paralysis and the Paradox of Choice. Rather than asking users to utilize a complex web of cables to connect signal paths as they would in a modular synthesizer, the Minimoog presented a more simplified experience. I design things that other people want to use.”³ “Artist feedback drove all my development work… The point is that I don’t design stuff for myself. Even Moog himself touches on this in the context of his process saying, “Artist feedback drove all my development work… The point is that I don’t design stuff for myself. Unlike its predecessors, which seemed to tailor their designs for electrical engineers and specialized scientists knowledgeable of electronic sound synthesis, Moog’s design started with the user first. Upon its release, Moog’s Minimoog condensed a significantly complicated instrument down to a considerably smaller format that could be more easily adopted by musicians. Pictured: A Moog modular synthesizer, a predecessor to the Minimoog with a considerably more complex user interface. These developments created an opportunity to redesign and re-envision the sound synthesis experience that would be soon addressed by the Minimoog. Additionally, they were difficult to access due to their cost, limited production, and required knowledge to operate them. These machines resembled more a complicated computer in an evil scientist’s lab rather than an instrument in a musician’s studio. Starting in the 1950s and continuing during the 1960s, the earliest synthesizers were introduced in the form of the modular synthesizer, a complicated machine consisting of dozens of sections, or “modules,” connected manually by cables to program sounds. Prior to this, the synthesizer looked quite different. When Bob Moog’s Minimoog Model D was introduced in 1970, it set a new precedent for interface design in synthesizers as we know them today, a piano-style keyboard connected to a circuit board with knobs and sliders. Every extra unit of information in an interface competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.”² “Interfaces should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Section 2: Aesthetic and minimalist design These heuristics will help us better understand the lineage of decades of instruments that would follow early commercial synthesizers such as the Minimoog. In this article, I will be taking a design methodology approach to study some of the heuristic principles behind Bob Moog’s Minimoog Model D synthesizer design, how it re-imagined the sound synthesis experience, and the impact it had in setting a new standard for the interface design of synthesizers.
Moog, who saw the future potential for machines to make music, a concept that then seemed outlandish.
It was the 60’s and electronic computers were still a cryptic technology that remained obscure to most, a far cry from today where around 6 billion active smartphones are owned by users around the world, effectively giving the majority of the world’s population more compute power than the most advanced super-computers of the ’60s.¹ Although the technology then would be considered primitive by today’s standards, sentiments about the computer’s potential were eager and optimistic, especially among electric engineers such as Robert A. Image: History Center in Tompkins County Abstract Pictured: Bob Moog with the Minimoog and modular Moog synthesizers.
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