The Swedish company Teenage Engineering has won over kids — and professionals — with a revolutionary idea for a synthesizer: Make it simple.

Full liner notes for the Laurie Spiegel album.

Interactive music-making. Build synths & sounds all in the browser, and share your creations.

The machine cost $250,000; it stood at a forbidding seven feet tall and stretched the width of the room; it could take up to 12 hours to re-calibrate if a mistake were made. The user would control for pitch, timbre, volume, and envelope for each note individually with a typewriter-like hole-punch, creating a paper script to be fed into the machine. Only the machine’s designers and engineers were even vaguely comfortable with it, and only the most intrepid of composers dared use it.

A software synthesizer I’d very much like to try.