Google Honors Bob Moog, Turns Search Engine Into A Synth!

Google is honoring Bob Moog‘s birthday with a special interactive Moog style synth.

Moog’s birthday is May 23rd, so the interactive ‘doodle’ was active in Australia and Japan first, and is now active in the US. The browser-based synth not only lets you play notes, but you can use the controls to shape the sound.

Here’s what Google has to say about their Moog tribute:

With his passion for high-tech toolmaking in the service of creativity, Bob Moog is something of a patron saint of the nerdy arts and a hero to many of us here.

So for the next 24 hours on our homepage, you’ll find an interactive, playable logo inspired by the instruments with which Moog brought musical performance into the electronic age. You can use your mouse or computer keyboard to control the mini-synthesizer’s keys and knobs to make nearly limitless sounds.

Keeping with the theme of 1960s music technology, we’ve patched the keyboard into a 4-track tape recorder so you can record, play back and share songs via short links or Google+.

We tested out the ‘MiniGoog’ in Chrome – so your results may vary in other browsers.

Here’s a Quick Start Guide for the Moog Doodle Synthesizer:

Moog Doodle synth minigoog

Mark Doty put together this tutorial on using the ‘MiniGoog’ synth. It’s aimed towards complete beginners, but does a great job of explaining the controls:

The Bob Moog Foundation is holding a contest that ties in with this, too. Record a jam with the MiniGoog, and you could win a copy of  Dr. Bob’s Collector Pack.

Check it out and let us know what you think! And if you create the ultimate MiniGoog synth jam, post a link!

via tuf, synthwidow, Vitor Jesus, Randall A. Gordan and several other readers.

23 thoughts on “Google Honors Bob Moog, Turns Search Engine Into A Synth!

  1. That is the coolest doodle ever. I use Firefox and woks with no problems.
    PS: it also allow you to play with you computer keyboard.

  2. happy birthday BOB – the web has come a long way since 1991 this is better than most of the gear i had back then

    sad that it does not work on android

  3. Damn it, am I the only one with terrible latency? Tried on 2 computers, 2 OS’s (W7 and openSuse), additional sound card, 3 browsers and still latency is around 1 second. And there’s a click and a pause between the sounds.

  4. It wouldn’t work in my version of Safari, but it worked as stated in Chrome on my sister’s PC. I only played around with it for a few minutes, but I was surprised at how dirty (for lack of a better word) it sounded. Maybe I’ll sample the output.

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