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 A Keyboard?
The Touché, completed in 1980, is a hybrid polyphonic keyboard instrument. It features digital sound and control voltage generation along with an analogue signal processing back end, utilising an internal general‑purpose computer to create connections between the user interface and its sound generation hardware. Typically, these linkages are defined using a specialised software called FOIL (Far Out Instrument Language), written by David Rosenboom.
The Touché repurposes other 300‑series hardware, most notably the 360 Programmable Octal Signal Source and the 364 Multiple Arbitrary Function Generator. The 360 was an eight‑voice polyphonic synthesizer with a modular user interface, combining digital sound generation and waveshaping with analogue signal processing. The 364, on the other hand, was a 64‑channel control voltage generator and processor. Within the context of a 300 system, these devices were programmed using a software language called PATCH‑IV. Whereas the 300 and PATCH‑IV prioritised open‑endedness, the Touché aimed for immediacy and playability. PATCH‑IV treated its hardware like a digital modular synthesizer, leaving it to the user to define signal interconnections and parameter values on a fairly granular level. FOIL, however, treated the same hardware like a more typical polyphonic synthesizer, with predefined modulation paths and macro parameter settings that applied to many simultaneous voices.
As stated before, many claim that Buchla sought to avoid using mechanical black and white keyboards in his designs. It’s true that he did not see the keyboard as the only valid playing interface for electronic instruments, and resisted the idea that it should be the default mode of interaction, as it seemed to be for other makers. He was concerned that, if an instrument had a keyboard attached, the resulting music would tend to conform to existing traditions and habits; but he was more interested in building new artistic modalities around electronic instruments’ unique strengths. As such, many of his instruments eschewed traditional keyboards in favour of capacitive touch plates, joysticks and audio‑responsive control methods. So, why did he deem the keyboard appropriate for the Touché, specifically? In his own words:
“I became acquainted with a number of keyboard players whose musical and technical skills I admired, and some of whom expressed an interest in a keyboard instrument that possessed some unusual degrees of freedom. Touché’s initial users, representing a minuscule fraction of the world’s keyboard players, might best be described as performers of avant garde and experimental music. They share an interest in investigating and applying sounds that sometimes fail to conform to traditional concepts of what constitutes musically useful sonic material, and the structured aspects of their music have been known to deviate from norms established through centuries of encounters with real‑world vibrations.”
So, despite its ‘conventional’ input structure, Buchla saw the Touché as an instrument for exploring new and unusual approaches to music‑making. He mentions that specific musicians had inspired him to pursue the design of a keyboard instrument. He is at very least referring to performer‑composer JB Floyd, as well as Rosenboom — who, again, worked closely with Buchla on the Touché’s design. As with his prior work, the Touché was developed primarily to satisfy Buchla and his friends’ artistic curiosities, and was only one of their many answers to the question of how an electronic musical instrument could work.
How Does The Touché Work?
At a glance, the Touché might seem to resemble other polyphonic, microprocessor‑ or computer‑equipped instruments of its time, such as the Sequential Circuits Prophet‑5, New England Digital Synclavier, or the Fairlight CMI. Unsurprisingly, though, the Touché’s signal path is unlike other contemporary commercial instruments, and is perhaps better seen as an extension of the synthesis approaches in prior Buchla instruments. It bears many similarities to the now‑famous Music Easel and Model 259 oscillator, with some key differences.
As in the 360, each of the Touché’s eight voices contains three digital sine‑wave oscillators, a digital waveshaper, and an analogue low‑pass gate. Each of the three oscillators serves a specific purpose: only one is used as a sound generator, with the others dedicated to frequency and timbre modulation of the main oscillator, respectively. The two modulation oscillators have an extremely wide frequency range, and can be used similarly to conventional LFOs for vibrato or tremolo‑like waveshaping applications. They can also be used for audio‑rate modulation, resulting in complex and sometimes clangorous timbres — similar to those that we know and love from Buchla’s earlier modular systems.
While devices like the Music Easel use analogue wavefolders to modify the oscillators’ core timbre, the Touché instead uses a technique called digital nonlinear waveshaping. Popular among 1970s computer music researchers, this technique employs a digital lookup process to dynamically distort an incoming sine wave, adding harmonic overtones in a continuously controllable fashion — somewhat like a precisely controllable, customisable wavefolder. In this process, the sine wave ‘scans’ a so‑called ‘waveshaping table’, reading the contents of the table back and forth from the centre in a sinusoidal fashion, using the lookup values to define the instantaneous amplitude of the outgoing signal. In the Touché, the Timbre parameter controls the amplitude of the sine wave prior to this lookup process, effectively determining the ‘scanning width’. At low Timbre values, the sine wave scans only a small region at the centre of the table; conversely, at the maximum Timbre values, it scans the entire table. By changing the Timbre value, or by changing the contents of the table, a variety of sounds can be achieved. Additionally, the timbre modulation oscillator can be used to continuously control the amount of waveshaping applied to the principal oscillator — in concept, modulating the amplitude of the sine wave prior to the waveshaper, and therefore altering the region of the table that is scanned. This can result in continuously evolving timbres and, if desired, brash inharmonic tones.
After the waveshaping process, the digital sound sources are converted to analogue and passed through low‑pass gates. These impart the familiar organic response found in Buchla’s other instruments, however, the overall sonic character of the Touché’s sound generation differs from more familiar ‘Buchla’ sounds. The digital oscillators introduce slight jitter and aliasing, which, when coupled with the low‑pass gates, results in a strange and captivating intersection of hi‑fi analogue and lo‑fi digital characteristics (foreshadowing the character of Buchla’s later 200e system, still in production to this day).
The outputs from all eight gates are summed and passed through an analogue phase‑shifting network. The phaser has its own modulation oscillator with variable depth and frequency. It cannot be bypassed; the Touché’s final outputs are tapped from four points in the phase‑shifting network, resulting in a pseudo‑quadraphonic spatialised output, where sounds continuously morph and shift around the sound field.
Controlling Sound In FOIL
Each voice offers seven primary parameters: pitch, FM frequency and FM depth (or ‘index’), timbre modulation frequency and timbre modulation index, the timbre value itself, and the low‑pass gate level control. Five of these parameters (namely pitch, FM index, timbre, timbre modulation index and level) can be dynamically modulated. Whereas other synthesizers of the time might only include a small number of assignable envelopes or LFOs, the Touché instead offers dedicated per‑voice complex modulation sources for each of these parameters. That is, each of these parameters has its own built‑in modulator, referred to as a ‘time varying function’.
Functions can be thought of as six‑stage envelopes, capable of some unusual tricks. Functions may be continuous or stepped; they can loop; and they can contain skips, jumps, or other types of conditional behaviour. They can be programmed to act like simple sequencers, envelopes and LFOs, and can even respond differently to a key being pressed and being released. However, in FOIL, functions are programmed using text alone; there is no associated hardware user interface or graphical display. Data entry is handled either via front‑panel buttons or through a connected RS‑232 terminal’s keyboard — arcane from a modern perspective, but forward‑thinking for its time.
Of course, this means that the Touché has dozens of parameters. Luckily, FOIL can store and recall ‘instrument definitions’. Each definition stores all settings for the Touché’s modulation sources, control routing, low‑pass gate mode and waveshaping table assignment. The Touché can store and recall ‘libraries’ of up to 48 instrument definitions each.
The Touché can load two instrument definitions simultaneously, permitting bi‑timbral behaviours like keyboard splits, layers and even crossfades between the two active instruments. It also offers a curious voice allocation mode called ‘adaptive partitioning’, in which a special algorithm extrapolates the position of the player’s left and right hands, dynamically reassigning the split point so that one timbre is always played by the left hand and one is always played by the right, regardless of where the player’s hands are on the keyboard.
The Touché also includes so‑called ‘programmed stimuli’ as a means of dynamically altering the instrument’s response as it is played. Available stimuli include eight front‑panel switches and two pedal inputs. They can be programmed to alter the behaviour of the function generators, or to supply data to user‑defined subroutines. These can be used as a way of switching between different types of sounds. For instance, engaging a pedal could turn an otherwise calm and stable sound into a series of interwoven arpeggios; pressing a switch could turn a gradual swelling envelope into a repeating percussive burst.
The Touché also includes other experimental features, such as an integrated sequencer, microtonal tuning and an extensive array of control voltage inputs and outputs. Moreover, its software was deeply open‑ended, and Buchla invited users to create their own custom modifications, extensions, or even complete instrument languages. While it was geared toward relative immediacy, it was also intended to act as a platform for further development — hopefully enabling new approaches to computer‑based composition and live performance.
Reception & Legacy
The Touché was publicly unveiled on the 14th April, 1980, at a party hosted by Buchla and broadcast by Bay Area radio station KPFA. The party was attended by a broad range of Bay Area composers and journalists, many of whom held differing opinions on the instrument’s promise. Of course, Rosenboom himself expressed great enthusiasm about its future, seeing it as an earnest way to provide composers access to cutting‑edge live performance technology — after all, live performance with computers was extremely uncommon at the time (three years, we might note, before the introduction of MIDI).
Other attendees expressed disinterest in what the instrument offered. Many were local composers who had already begun to incorporate hardware and software design into their own musical practice. The Bay Area electronic music scene already embraced this DIY ethos, and as such, an $8500 keyboard instrument was not attractive to many of Buchla’s would‑be clients. When asked by an interviewer about its commercial prospects, Buchla shied away from the question — instead stating that, while he mostly made instruments for himself, the Touché was an instrument designed specifically for a couple of his close friends. Despite its seemingly conventional playing interface, ultimately, Buchla did not seem to see the Touché as an instrument for the masses.
Shortly after the Touché was introduced, Buchla began work on his next generation of electronic instruments: the 400 Series, first introduced in 1982. The 400 was the first of Buchla’s computer instruments to offer graphical user interfaces, largely abandoning purely text‑based programming approaches. Buchla and his collaborator DN ‘Lynx’ Crowe developed several software languages for the 400, each of which facilitated distinct approaches to music‑making, including capabilities such as score editing, sequencing and complex algorithmic processes. For Buchla, the 400 was a more complete and capable realisation of what the Touché was meant to be.
The exact number is uncertain, but only around five Touché are known to have been made. As such, the instrument never escaped Buchla’s immediate circle of friends and collaborators. It was used in concert works by Ami Radunskya, JB Floyd, and most extensively by David Rosenboom, who continued to develop its software even after Buchla’s priorities had shifted toward new projects. By the mid‑1980s, Rosenboom was using the Touché as a testing ground for concepts that led to HMSL (Hierarchical Music Specification Language). Developed by Rosenboom, Larry Polansky, and Phil Burk at Mills College, HMSL became a relatively popular software for interactive live performance with computers. The Touché can be heard on Rosenboom’s albums Future Travel and Daytime Viewing, as well as his piece ‘Zones Of Influence’, created for percussionist William Winant. In more recent years, Rosenboom’s personal Touché was restored by Rick Smith of the Buchla Archives in Vancouver, British Columbia. This instrument can be heard on Smith’s album Shasta Cults; this same instrument is the subject of a video detailing the Touché’s history and functionality, which can be viewed on Sarah Belle Reid’s YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/user/sarahbellereid.
Though the Touché might seem to lean slightly more toward traditional musical applications than we typically associate with Buchla’s instruments, it is still full of quirks, surprises and unusual design decisions.
Though the Touché might seem to lean slightly more toward traditional musical applications than we typically associate with Buchla’s instruments, it is still full of quirks, surprises and unusual design decisions. For a curious and open‑minded performer, it encourages the exploration of novel sounds and interactions, ideally leading them in a new musical direction. It also reveals a very human angle that is often absent from discussion of Buchla’s work: while he never seems to have intended to use the Touché for his own music, he learned and drew inspiration from working closely with musicians that he admired and called his friends. The Touché is one of many instruments that developed from such a creative partnership.
Special thanks to the Buchla Archives for their support of this research.