JEFFREY BROWN:

Start with a circuit board, add knobs and dials, solder everything together, and, eventually, if you know what you're doing, you have an instrument that can do this.

Moogfest, named after inventor Robert Moog, is a celebration of the art, engineering and technology of synthesizers, machines that create sounds electronically. By night, it's a festival of different genres of music, centered on, as they call them here, synths.

By day, talks, workshops, a pop-up factory, and plenty of hands-on tinkering, twisting, and tapping.

Creative director Emmy Parker says the big idea behind the festival is in the name of the instrument, to synthesize.