Buchla Touché Polysynth

Just like all his other creations, Don Buchla’s polysynth was ambitious — and unique.

Once a relatively obscure figure, artist and inventor Donald Buchla (1937‑2016) is now more influential than ever. Buchla is perhaps best known for his pioneering work in the field of electronic instrument design. His instruments, geared toward experimentation and discovery, were borne from the musical avant garde and technofuturistic corners of the Bay Area counterculture. Focused primarily on his own art, Buchla was largely unconcerned with commercial success. As such, at first, his work was not as widely adopted as that of his contemporaries.

However, the 21st Century growth of interest in modular synthesizers has brought Buchla’s work into popular focus. His early modular synthesizer designs (especially the mid‑1960s Series 100 and 1970s Series 200 systems) have become foundational to modern instrument designers seeking models of musical interaction that break from mainstream musical traditions. Today, companies such as Buchla USA and Tiptop Audio produce reimagined, commercialised versions of several of Buchla’s original designs. Others, such as Make Noise, Verbos Electronics and Frap Tools have created their own complete Eurorack modular systems that extensively reference Buchla’s work. Thanks in part to these makers, instruments such as the 100, 200 and Music Easel are now well known, and their design ideologies more broadly embraced.

Buchla’s original instruments, many of which were bespoke or custom designs, were never produced in large quantities. As a result, most musicians have never seen or played an original Buchla instrument, instead experiencing his design philosophies through secondhand sources. Because of these factors, Buchla’s later work — after the 1970s 200 Series — remains relatively obscure. He continued to design new instruments until his death, but many of them remain little‑known. Focusing exclusively on his early modular systems paints an incomplete view of his creative and technical approach, and misses out on some of his most exciting, bewildering and unusual work.

Today, many think of Buchla as having specifically created analogue modular synthesizers with unconventional playing interfaces. They might think of the music made with his instruments as being atonal, noisy, chaotic or ‘alien’. Popular discourse commonly echoes that he hated black and white piano keyboards, and refused to use them in his designs.

Yet, there is the Touché: a polyphonic, computer‑based keyboard instrument and composition ecosystem developed by Buchla & Associates around 1980. So, how do we get from the 1960s Series 100 — notorious tool of the avant garde — to an instrument that seems to resemble commercial contemporaries such as the Synclavier or Fairlight? Are these comparisons valid, or is there something more peculiar behind the Touché’s design and intentions? To answer these questions, let’s revisit how the Touché came to be.

Buchla’s Computer Lutherie

In their time, Buchla’s early creations — namely, the 100 and 200 modular systems — were well respected; dozens of these instruments were built in the latter half of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Most were commissioned by educational institutions who sought to develop cutting‑edge programs in the emerging field of electronic music. Buchla’s modular systems presented a tremendous leap in musical potential over prior purely tape‑based workflows, making composition much more intuitive and expedient.

Even by the late 1960s, however, musical applications of then‑new digital computing technologies had begun to show promise, with early advances emerging from institutions such as Bell Labs, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the University of Illinois. Buchla was well aware of these developments, and as early as 1969, he had begun plans to integrate computers into his instruments.

In 1972, Buchla & Associates debuted the Series 500: an instrument which augmented Series 200 modular designs with a 16‑bit mini‑computer, used primarily for patch storage and recall, as well as control voltage generation. By 1975, this technology led to the 502 Electric Music Box, a self‑contained instrument. Largely forgoing the patch cables of its predecessors, the 502 offered full software‑based control of its audio and control signal routing and user interaction. However, it was over $60,000 at the time of its introduction — prohibitively expensive by most standards. Its largest material expense was the mini‑computer itself; but in the mid‑1970s, new microprocessor technologies began to appear on the public market.

Realising that these much more affordable microprocessors held considerable technical promise, Buchla shifted his focus toward yet another new family of instruments: the Series 300, which paired 200‑series modules with new computer‑controlled modules and digital interfaces. Around this time, Buchla developed a close friendship and collaborative partnership with composer David Rosenboom, who had independently been developing software and computer technologies for live performance. Rosenboom began to contribute to the conceptualisation of new Buchla designs, including the now famous Model 259 Programmable Complex Waveform Generator (the inspiration for most modern Eurorack ‘complex oscillators’). The 259 was an analogue sound generator for 300‑series systems, and all of its parameters could be dynamically controlled from the system’s computer.

As Buchla developed the 300’s system infrastructure, though, he and Rosenboom realised that it could form the basis for a more streamlined, self‑contained, non‑modular instrument. Buchla saw the modular 300 system as a general‑purpose platform through which composers could experiment and construct novel methods of musical interaction; but simultaneously, he and Rosenboom imagined a future in which more ‘legitimate’ electronic instruments could be embraced by a broader range of musicians. They imagined that, if an instrument were less open‑ended, it might have a chance of developing repertoire and technique — and, by extension, have greater staying power. It was this thinking that ultimately led to the Touché.

A Buchla... With...