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Appendix B Synthesizer Basics 498
A brief synthesizer history
Precursors to the synthesizer
The earliest seeds of modern electronic synthesizers began in the twilight years of the 19th
century. In 1897, an American inventor named Thaddeus Cahill was issued a patent to protect the
principle behind an instrument known as the Telharmonium, or Dynamophone. Weighing in at
200 tons, this mammoth electronic instrument was driven by 12 steam-powered electromagnetic
generators. It was played in real time using velocity-sensitive keys and, amazingly, was able to
generate several dierent sounds simultaneously. The Telharmonium was presented to the public
in a series of “concerts” held in 1906. Christened “Telharmony,” this music was piped into the
public telephone network, because no public address systems were available at the time.
In 1919, Russian inventor Leon Theremin took a markedly dierent approach. Named after the
man who masterminded it, the monophonic Theremin was played without actually touching
the instrument. It gauged the proximity of the player’s hands as they were waved about in an
electrostatic eld between two antennae, and used this information to generate sound. This
unorthodox technique made the Theremin enormously dicult to play. Its eerie, spine-tingling—
but almost unvarying—timbre made it a favorite on countless horror movie soundtracks. R. A.
Moog, whose synthesizers would later garner worldwide fame, began to build Theremins at the
age of 19.
In Europe, Frenchman Maurice Martenot devised the monophonic Ondes Martenot in 1928. The
sound generation method of this instrument was akin to that of the Theremin, but in its earliest
incarnation it was played by pulling a wire back and forth.
In Berlin during the 1930s, Friedrich Trautwein and Oskar Sala worked on the Trautonium,
an instrument that was played by pressing a steel wire onto a bar. Depending on the
player’s preference, it enabled either innitely variable pitches—much like a fretless stringed
instrument—or incremental pitches similar to that of a keyboard instrument. Sala continued
to develop the instrument throughout his life, an eort culminating in the two-voice
Mixturtrautonium in 1952. He scored numerous industrial lms, as well as the entire soundtrack
of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece The Birds, with this instrument. Although the movie does not
feature a conventional musical soundtrack, all bird calls and the sound of beating wings heard in
the movie were generated on the Mixturtrautonium.
In Canada, Hugh Le Caine began to develop his Electronic Sackbut in 1945. The design of
this monophonic instrument resembled that of a synthesizer, but it featured an enormously
expressive keyboard that responded not only to key velocity and pressure but also to
lateral motion.
The instruments discussed thus far were all designed to be played in real time. Relatively early,
however, people began to develop instruments that combined electronic sound generators
and sequencers. The rst instrument of this kind—named the Automatically Operating Musical
Instrument of the Electric Oscillation Type—was presented by the French duo Edouard Coupleux
and Joseph Givelet in 1929. This hybrid married electronic sound generation to a mechanically
punched tape control. Its name was unocially shortened to Coupleux-Givelet Synthesizer by its
builders, the rst time a musical instrument was called a “synthesizer.”