bob moog invented the protocol of one volt per octave.
bob moog invented the protocol of one volt per octave.
who invented the protocol of one volt per octave?
bob moog
bullet::::- volts per octave was popularized by bob moog in the 1960s, and was widely adopted for control interfacing. one volt represents one octave, so the pitch produced by a voltage of 3v is one octave lower than that produced by a voltage of 4v. companies using this cv method included roland, moog, sequential circuits, oberheim, arp and the eurorack standard from doepfer, including more than 7000 modules from at least 316 manufacturers. this convention typically had control modules carry the source voltage (b+, 5v) on the ring of a trs jack, with the processed voltage returning on the tip. however, other manufacturers have used different implementations with voltages including -5 to 5v, 0 to 5v, 0 to 10v with the b+ possibly on the tip. this makes interoperability of modules problematic.
cv/gate
voltage control in analog music synthesizers is similar in principle to how voltage is used in electronic analog computers, in which voltage is a scaled analog of a quantity that is part of the computation. for instance, control voltages can be added or subtracted in a circuit almost identical to an adder in such a computer. inside a synthesizer vco, an analog exponential function provides the 1 volt per octave control of an oscillator that basically runs on a volts/khz basis. positive voltage polarity raises pitch, and negative lowers it. the result is that, for example, a standard keyboard can have its output scaled to that of a quarter-tone keyboard by changing its output to one-half volt per octave, with no other technical changes.
moog synthesizer