Google Doodles celebrates Robert Moog's 78th birthday

Google Doodles celebrates Robert Moog's 78th birthday



Internet search giant Google has come out with an interactive doodle on its homepage today to mark the 78th birth anniversary of Arthur 'Bob' Moog, an American music enthusiast who invented the 'Moog synthesizer'.

The virtual synthesizer allows Google users to play it by simply moving the cursor on the keys. It also allows the users to create their own music, record it, play back and even share them on the social networking site Google+ by just clicking on the g+ button.

It also has features which one can use to adjust volume, mixer, oscillator, filter and envelope controls.

Robert Moog was born on the 23rd of May in 1934 in New York city. He got his bachelor's degree in physics as well as electrical engineering and a Ph.D in engineering physics. Over the course of his lifetime, Moog formed two companies that manufactured electronic musical instruments. The Moog synthesizer was one of the first widely used electronic music instruments. The technological development which enabled the creation of the Moog synthesizer was the transistor. The Moog company was the first to commercially manufacture the modular voltage-controlled analog synthesizer systems in the early 1950s. In 1971, Moog Music started to produce the Minimoog Model D which was one of the first portable and more or less affordable synthesizers.


In 1970, Moog received a Grammy Trustees Award for lifetime achievement. In 2002, he was honoured with a Special Merit/Technical Grammy Award and an honorary doctorate degree from Berklee College of Music. On the 28th of April, 2005, Moog was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme brain tumour. He died four months later, at the age of 71 on the 21st of August 2005. A foundation, the Bob Moog Foundation was created as a memorial to him whose aim was to continue developing electronic music.