Electronic music

Mozart had just turned three when a Jesuit priest in Paris created the first electronic glockenspiel. While the composers of Viennese Classicism were preparing for the culmination of pianoforte music, the French inventor had found a way to produce electric current using friction; the current caused little hammers to strike bells. Even though the sound was still produced in a conventional way, the inventive priest's clavessin électrique was the first instrument with an electric interface.

It was to take another 100 years until electric current could be transformed into sound,  namely with the birth of the telephone. The invention of the telephone went hand-in-hand with other new technology – the microphone, the loudspeaker and the amplifier, which were the basic requirements for recording and reproducing sounds. Together with the telephone, the gramophone record also came on to the market in the 1870s and established itself for the next 100 years as the no. 1 medium for the reproduction of music.

Even before the 19th century was over, another visionary joined the ranks of creative instrument makers: Thaddeus Cahill's aim was nothing less than to imitate an entire orchestra. The American inventor's telharmonium was the first precursor of the synthesizer. The instrument was colossal in size: it was roughly 18 metres long and weighed in at 200 tons, so that it stretched over two floors of New York's Telharmonic Hall. The player sat at the console on the upper floor, while one storey beneath him stood a huge power plant with 145 generators to supply the electric current needed. In the absence of loudspeakers, the telharmonium could only be heard using a telephone. Cahill offered the very first streaming service in the shape of subscriptions that he sold to the public.

While Europeans pursued research into dissecting sounds in the early years of the 20th century, with the German universal scholar Hermann von Helmholtz developing frequency-based sound synthesis, Russian-American inventor Leon Theremin created a stir with an idea of his own in 1920: he had developed an instrument that could produce sound without being touched. The mysterious sound of his theremin remains a favourite in film music to this day. The instrument is fitted with two antennae between which there is an electro-magnetic field. The player moves his hands inside this field to change the basic note produced by the oscillators: he controls the pitch with his right hand and the volume with his left.

Leon Theremin plays his instrument

The theremin in turn inspired others, not least the founding father of the synthesizer, Robert Moog. The French cellist, inventor and radio telegrapher Maurice Martenot was fascinated by this remarkable instrument, and it served as inspiration for his own ondes Martenot (»Martenot's waves«) in 1928. Here, the pitch of the basic note is altered using a wire along which a ring is moved to and fro. To provide the player with some orientation, Martenot placed a silent piano keyboard in front of the instrument itself; only later did he hit upon the idea of controlling the sound directly from the keyboard. The ondes Martenot has maintained a place in the world of instruments to this day, finding use by artists as different as Olivier Messiaen and Jacques Brel or in the soundtrack to »Ghostbusters«.

Maurice Martenot presents his new instrument

Another inventor who immortalised his name with an instrument around the year 1930 was the American Laurens Hammond. Originally intended as replacement for an organ with pipes, the Hammond organ was soon the sound star of jazz and gospel music. The instrument's characteristic rumbling sound is produced by metal wheels with serrated edges, rotating in front of electro-magnetic pickups such as are also used in electric guitars. The Hammond organ was first heard in public in New York in 1935 – playing, of all things, an arrangement of Brahms's First Symphony.

Even before the analogue synthesizers from America conquered the world, Australian scientists were experimenting with digital sound production in the 1950s.The computer they used was called Council of Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer, abbreviated to CSIRAC. It was hooked up to a loudspeaker through which it announced the end of a calculation process with an acoustic signal. Its trainers were delighted: to prove that a machine like this really could do everything, one of the technicians programmed little tunes in his spare time that the computer then played.

The singing computer created quite a stir, but at the end of the day it failed to catch on: the computers of that time were simply too big, too expensive and above all too slow. The next programmable sound machine was built in American in 1957: the RCA Mark I Sound Synthesizer. It was designed by the electronics and entertainment company RCA as a hit machine that would analyse successful songs and generate new ones. But the project was a failure, and the follow-up model Mark II was likewise too slow and not particularly successful: like its elder brother, the computer was the size of a room and worked with punched paper tape using algorithms and valve oscillators.

Parallel to Buchla's work, the two inventors Dave Smith and John Bowen developed the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, which took the world of electronic music by storm in 1978; a big name for a synthesizer, but an apt one for what became a legendary classic: the Prophet-5 formed the sound of the late 70s and early 80s. This was the very first polyphonic synthesizer, fully programmable with up to five parts. It also offered the opportunity to store data on an external cartridge drive.

There was a total of at least three innovations that ushered in the 1980s and a new era in music production. Firstly, the first affordable personal computers came on the market; secondly, electronic music data were standardised with the introduction of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), and thirdly, the necessary software was written.

Thus digital sound production finally had its breakthrough: in 1983 the Yamaha DX7 was advertised as the latest milestone in human history after the invention of the wheel and electric light. And it's true that the first digital synthesizer was nothing short of a sensation: with 16 parts (voices), touch dynamics and a memory, it was more powerful than any other such machine of its time. The bass, piano and bell effects that it produced using FM synthesis (FM = frequency modulation) became the trademark sound of countless 80s pop and rock sounds, such as Whitney Houston's »The Greatest Love of All«.

Numerous inventors have been researching into digital sound production since the 1980s – among them, some of the greatest to emerge so far: Ray Kurzweil for example, who not only created Apple's »Siri«, is Head of Development at Google and has no fewer than 21 honorary doctorates, but whose keyboard, developed for none other than Stevie Wonder, stood for the best synthetic piano sound for years.

The omnipresence of the computer has also left its mark on the world of music. Every modern smartphone possesses more processing power than computers made in the 1990s. Equipped with the necessary software, every laptop can be turned into a recording studio or a composing machine. Yet the current boom of analogue retro synthesizers and not least of superb musicians like Suzanne Ciani show that technology alone doesn't make people happy. Only human creativity makes machines into music.

Text: Julika von Werder; last updated: 2. Februar 2022
Translation: Clive Williams