Exploring Touché, Don Buchla’s Rare Polyphonic Keyboard Instrument
Electronic musician Sarah Belle Reid shared a new video, exploring an extremely rare electronic instrument called the Touché, created by Buchla and Associates in 1980.
Filmed at the Buchla Archives in Vancouver – an organization dedicated to the preservation of Donald Buchla’s work – the video offers a rare opportunity to hear and see an instrument that very few people have ever encountered firsthand.
Reid’s video begins with an overview of how the Touché grew out of Buchla’s earlier computer-controlled instruments of the 1970s, including the 300 Series systems. From there, the video offers a detailed walkthrough of Touché’s sound architecture, including many musical demos.
In the following video, below, Reid shares a short live performance with the Touché.
About The Buchla Touché
Only around five Touché are known to have been built, and very few remain functional today. Because of this, the instrument has remained largely absent from both public performance and documentation. Reid’s video helps bridge that gap by sharing the Touché’s sound, design, and historical context with a wider audience.
While Don Buchla is best known for his modular synthesizers such as the 100 and 200 Series, he also created a number of non-modular, computer-based instruments like the Touché that explored new relationships between performance, software, and sound.
The Touché was conceived by Don Buchla in collaboration with composer David Rosenboom. It is a bi-timbral, eight-voice polyphonic keyboard instrument that combines digital sound generation, analog processing, and computer-mediated control.
