Synthesizer Instruments
Synthesizer Instruments Fast Facts
Robert Moog, or rather Dr. Moog as
he became having gained his Ph.D, teamed up with an electronic music composer
named Herb Deutsch in 1963 and they established a company producing voltage-controlled
synthesizer modules based on the three essential ingredients of sounds:
pitch, tone, and volume, from which they produced the VCO, the VCF, and
the VCA. What turned this rather esoteric exercise into a major industry
was an LP made in 1967 called “Switched On Bach” on which the performer,
Walter Carlos, had exclusively used the Moog modules.
I think of synthesizers as tools for making instruments. A piano is only
one instrument. A synth is whatever you’ve programmed into it for that
moment. And its use musically is determined by you concept of that sound
in relation to what other music is going on around it. So where it goes
is determined by the person playing it.” – Herbie Hancock
A Brief History of the Synthesizer Instruments
While the organ ruled supreme as the electronic instrument both on stage and in the home, a few designers were tinkering with more outlandish forms of pitched sound generation – synthesizers.
The first instrument to call itself a synthesizer was made by RCA in 1954 and was designed by two Americans, Harry F. Olson and Herbert Belar. The enormous and unwieldy RCA Mk 1 never really saw the light of day and was quickly replaced by the RCA Mk 2 (only slightly less cumbersome), which was duly installed in New York’s Columbia-Princeton studio at a cost of one hundred thousand dollars.
However, electronic instruments of one sort or another had been around since the turn of the century, and mechanical instruments (of which most of the early electronic instruments were simply electrified versions) date back almost as far the organ and piano themselves. It seems that no sooner had ‘an instrument’ been invented than someone else invented a model that played itself.
By the turn of the century, scientists the world over were busy putting their new-found awareness of the potential of electricity into practical, musical use. In 1903, Sir Charles Parsons demonstrated his Auxetophone – a sort of giant PA system. In 1906, the Canadian inventor Thaddeus Cahill actually built the Telharmonium, the 200 ton monster he’d patented ten years previously, and in the ‘20s and ‘30s a whole stream of French, German, and Russian research scientists labored over such bizarre contraptions as the Etherophone, Sperophone, Partiturophone, and Trautonium.
Early instruments like the ‘Automatically Operating
Musical Instrument of the Elecronic Oscillation Type’ designed in 1929
by two French inventors, Edouard Couplex and Joseph Givelet, often used
hole-punched tape reader systems – a concept designed by another Frenchman,
Jacquard, as far back as 1790, for use with weaving machines. This was
subsequently applied to musical instruments in the 19th century through
the player piano and mechanical harmonium.
If such instruments have a familiar ring to them, so they should.
They all used the binary system (in other words the tape reader responds
to one of two things on the tape: seeing a hole or not seeing a hole)
and were, in effect, computers. Couplex andGivelet used this system to
store data concerning pitch, volume, tone, etc. that was applied to a
number of oscillators and filters to produce music, electronic music.
‘Electronic music’ became so defined in Germany in the ‘50s to set itself apart from musique concrete – a related but significantly different form of musical manipulation that was becoming all the rage in France (musique concrete being based on recordings of natural, real, or ‘concrete’ sounds stored, initially, on disc; in effect, early sampling) – both of which were pioneered by radio station, NWDR in Cologne and ORTF in Paris.
But not all ‘pre-synthesizers’ were like Couplex and Givelet’s creation. Others used a far cruder from of control over oscillators, such as waving your arms about over a row of antennae (to change pitch) as seen on an outlandish instrument called the Etherophone, built by a Russian named Lev Termin in 1920; and the Ondes Musicale from Maurice Martinot, built in 1928.
View entire Synthesizer Instrument Collection
Copyright © 2007
Musical Instrument Shopping Store
All Rights Reserved
