\n\n\nAt Cornell I had a class called something like Learning Music Theory Through Digital Music Technology. I didn’t know any theory (I was a drummer, and tbh still don’t see the point of tonality) and I was like “learn by making techno, yes please!”\n\u201cNo need to review this code, the test suite will reveal any issues.\u201d
\n*runs tests*
\n*machine literally explodes*
\n\u201cWell, like I said.\u201d
\n
\nI didn’t learn any theory and pretty much had to teach myself the technology in lab hours; the instructor was a space case who would spend lectures trying to show us something, then the system would crash and he’d tell rambling stories while his assistant scrambled to fix things, rarely successful before the lecture ended.\n
\nANYWAY, the story I remember was that when Robert Moog, who’d been a Cornell engineering grad student, was designing his eponymous synthesizer, this instructor was assistant to him and his business partner. So they’d worked up a prototype that was finally ready for the public.
\nA big part of how it worked was like an old-tyme telephone switchboard, you “patched” different modules together by connecting them with cables, to this day the various settings to create a particular synthesizer sound are called “patches”.
\n\nThat was actually something that bugged me a lot about what I did manage to learn about this stuff \u2013 for I guess reasons of backwards compatibility with existing equipment and skills, incidental peculiarities of older technology \u2013 cables, voltage regulation, multi-track tape recording, samplers/synths/sequencers as rack hardware \u2013 were faithfully carried forward in terminology and practice. Meant a lot of things were done in confusing backwards-ass ways, while the software regularly crashed for trying to communicate with itself. Maybe the generation that grew up on FruityLoops got past that by now, I hope.
\nSo the two creators were like “it’s finally ready, try it out!” and this instructor, then a student working in the summer, stepped up for the first time, patched something wrong, and the unit caught fire.
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