What passes for music these days! Kids just drag and drop random noise and call it a song. I no sooner came to the epiphany that I was a dinosaur in the music world, than Mike Adams, announced he wanted to make this year’s Moogfest more like Austin’s SXSW techno festival. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

I had entered Moogest defining music with traditional notions of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Herbert Deutsch, who co-invented the synthesizer with the event’s namesake, Robert Moog, helped explain the reason for the treason with one of his T-shirts. It read, “Question Tonality.”

 Deutsch played with a Theremin as if he were teasing an angry cat, and the audience appeared to be as tickled as he. He also read pretentious prose from John Cage. I thought it was pure insanity until Deutsch explained that he was having fun, making fun of and with musical genres and technology.

 James Patrick and Chris Petti from Ableton’s Dubspot workshops further brought things into focus. Patrick had an uncanny talent for creating beautiful sounds and a philosophy that focused on transforming lives and having fun. Petti translated hipster words like “phat” and “shimmering” into waveforms I could understand. I was further helped along the Moogy path by a group of about seven Moogsters hanging out on smoke break. They fielded some more questions about analog synthesizers and monophony, and they directed me to the Make Your Own Synth workshop; but swore for the record that the conversation never happened.

 Thanks to YouTube, some missed events could be made up at home, like Hans Fjellestad’s documentary about Bob Moog. The vid shows Moog talking about invention coming to him from an “out-there” beyond the reach of the five senses. He grapples with the bondings musicians form with their instruments as well as the creative process. Moog goes so far as to claim, “I don’t see why a piece of matter, a piece of broken glass or an old record, can’t make contact through this very high level of reality that has access to everything past and future.”

 One could also catch the clips by the contestants in the 4th Annual Moog Circuit Bending Challenge. Competitors for the prize synthesizers had to adapt an electrical whatnot into a musical instrument spending less than $70. The video documentations flashed lights and played “bwaaaa-wa-wa” with the intention of heart surgery. The pretension was enough to drive any Gen-X poser wild. Then along came C FreddIE.

 C FreddIE blew the top off the joint with his ghetto humor. Talking like a punk and making electronic trash out of messes, C FreddIE duct-taped his s**t from the pawn   shop into until he exclaimed, “Moogfest ain’t gonna know what hit ‘em! . . . Know’m sayin’?”

 Also screened at Moogfest was the theatrical premier of “I Dream of Wires,” a documentary about geeks who can’t get enough walls of knobs. They may dream of wires, but after listening to synthesizers one day, I found myself waking up with themes and variations of the electronic arpeggios from Alan Parsons’ “I Robot” playing in my head.

I also dreamed of meeting Keith Emerson, of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, in the Masonic Lodge again. Things rolled out exactly as they had in real life, except Emerson stopped to ask my opinions. They were brutally honest. The chord progressions and timbres were masterful! Brilliant! The band was tight. The interview, however, was garbage.

Emerson had played on a synth with a huge tower of controls. Somebody had counted at least 37-Moog components. The next day, Moog announced the release of a new product, the Keith Emerson tower, and it was too late to be Moog’s April Fool’s joke.

Not to mention any names, other acts were just random and obnoxious. Other bright spots were the headliner Pet Shop Boys, except for their weird dancers, and classic contemporary composer Georgio Moroder.

Technical difficulties at the state-of-the-art festival continued from Friday night to Saturday morning. At long last, artist Charles Lindsay took the stage to talk about whales communicating in algorithmically-verifiable syntax. He later cautioned us to think about the permanent deformation all our signals cause to the electromagnetic plenum.

 As he spoke, the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” started playing in my head a split second before Lindsay said the second message he sent for the whales was, “All We Need Is Love.” Was it another affirmation from Moog’s “beyond” that, in spite of all the artificial intelligence we are more than meat machines – or were the MIT kids up to it again?

 The day before, the guys from MIT were talking about amazing things they’re doing with waves. Ben Bloomberg and his geeky friends had been asked to use technology to expand the audience of “Sleep No More.” It’s an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth wherein audience members wander through the rooms of a four-story warehouse in Manhattan and interact with whatever they want. The audience members have to wear masks, and the MIT guys rigged only a few of them with invisible audio equipment so some audience members would start hearing voices in their heads.

 Bloomberg also told of “Death and the Powers,” which included a Greek chorus of robots who, along with the rest of the theatre, became electromechanical extensions of the hero after he died. The robots questioned the meaning of life, and after the play returned to ask, “What was that?”

 On the lonely road back to my car, I unceremoniously removed my badges, but something was different. The car engines on the I-240 underpass were vibrating in perfect thirds, and the Doppler effect was hitting me with a slow attack. The white noise from the HVAC atop the Exxon was shimmering. Even my breath approximated a square wave with a duty cycle less than 50 percent.

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 Moog spokespeople estimated the festival’s average daily attendance at 7,000 paid and 25,000 free, and declared the event a major success, as did local officials. The economic analysis should be completed within six weeks.