Don Buchla

Don Buchla (1937–2016) studied physics, physiology, and music at Berkeley before the San Francisco Tape Music Center commissioned him to build a voltage-controlled instrument for Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender, leading to the Buchla 100 series in the early 1960s — developed independently of, and in a different idiom from, Robert Moog’s contemporary work, favoring touch plates and complex-waveform oscillators over the keyboard-and-filter conventions of what became known as “East Coast” synthesis.