Buchla Electronic Musical Instruments

In 2012 the original company led by Don Buchla was acquired by a group of Australian investors trading as Audio Supermarket Pty.

Buchla designed the synthesizer in a modular fashion, combining separate components that each generated or modified a music event.

Each box served a specific function: envelope generators, oscillators, filters, voltage controlled amplifiers, and analog sequencer modules.

Subotnick completed his first major electronic work, Silver Apples Of The Moon, with another unit that Buchla had built and shipped to New York.

The original Buchla modular synthesizer was commissioned by Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender and funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

The Buchla 200 series Electric Music Box[3] replaced the previous model in 1970 and represented a significant advance in technology.

This goal is evident in the omission of a standard musical keyboard on his early instruments, which instead used a series of touch plates that were not necessarily tied to equal-tempered tuning.

[11] Buchla's instruments, such as the Music Easel (pictured),[12] use a method of timbre generation different from Moog synthesizers.

In 2015, various websites, including FACT,[20] reported that Don Buchla had taken the owners of BEMI to court, citing health problems due in part to unpaid consulting fees and asserting a claim to his original intellectual property.

His obituary was reported in the New York Times[23] and elsewhere, noting his significant achievements to the world of electronic music and technology.

BEMI also established a new distribution model, discontinuing direct sales to customers and integrating more closely with a worldwide network of dealers.