Electronic musical instrument
An
electronic musical instrument is a
musical instrument that produces its sounds using
electronics. In contrast, the term
electric instrument is used to mean instruments whose sound is produced mechanically, and only amplified or altered electronically - for example an
electric guitar. Usually the instrument will have some way of controlling the sound, such as by adjusting the
pitch,
frequency, or duration of each
note.
All electric and electronic musical instruments can be viewed as a subset of
audio signal processing applications. Simple electronic musical instruments are sometimes called
sound effects; the border between sound effects and actual musical instruments is often hazy.
French
composer and engineer
Edgard Varèse created a variety of compositions using electronic horns, whistles, and tape. Most notably, he wrote
Poème Électronique for the Phillips pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in
1958.
Electronic musical instruments are now widely used in most styles of music. The development of new electronic musical instruments continues to be a highly active and interdisciplinary field of research. Specialized conferences, notably the International Conference on
New interfaces for musical expression, have organized to report cutting edge work, as well as to provide a showcase for artists who perform or create music with new electronic music instruments.
In the broadest sense, the very first electrified musical instrument was the
Denis d'or, dating from
1753. It was followed by the
Clavecin électrique by the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste de Laborde in
1761.
The first purely electronic musical instrument was the
Telharmonium, built by
Thaddeus Cahill in
1906. Employing electric generators and tonewheels to produce notes, it had a length of 60ft and a weight of 200 tons; because of a lack of suitable loudspeakers at that time, the music was distributed over the telephone network.
One of the many instruments constructed in the following decades was the
Theremin, invented by
Leon Theremin in 1917, which used a vacuum tube oscillator to make sounds that depended on the interactions of the user with an RF field. This was followed in 1928 by the
Ondes Martenot which had a keyboard as well as several auxiliary controllers.
The sound of the Ondes Martenot is used extensively in the
Turangalîla-Symphonie and other works by
Olivier Messiaen. However, these were not true synthesizers in the modern sense, as they were not configurable to produce a range of complex sounds by additive or subtractive synthesis, instead generating single pure tones with controllable
pitch,
amplitude and
vibrato.
Ca. 1929
Friedrich Trautwein invented the
Trautonium in Berlin. It was played with a resistor wire which has to be pressed against a metal plate.
Oskar Sala was one of the first players and continued development until his death in 2002.
Paul Hindemith wrote some compositions for it.
These early electronic instruments produced only pure tones and were frequently used to make
avant garde music. In April
1935, Laurens Hammond introduced the
Hammond tonewheel organ, which generated complex tones using an electro-mechanical principle derived from the design of the
Telharmonium. Later Hammond used the
Leslie speaker to achieve special modulation effects, and the resulting
Hammond organ sound is still regarded as the benchmark for the "electric organ" sound. This sound can be simulated by many modern synthesizers and digital samplers.
The most commonly used electronic instruments are
synthesizers, so-called because they artificially generate sound using techniques such as
additive,
subtractive,
FM and
physical modelling synthesis to create sounds.
Dr.
Robert Moog introduced the first practical commercial modern music
synthesizer with his
Moog synthesizer. This instrument used a series of tone generators with keys that would adjust the tone generators' pitch. To gain enough money to engineer this synthesizer, Moog sold
Theremins, a very peculiar instrument that uses no switches to trigger pitch or volume, relying instead upon a pair of antennae and the variable capacitance occasioned by the presence of the instrumentalist's hands.
The first
digital synthesizers were academic experiments in sound synthesis using digital computers.
FM synthesis was developed for this purpose, as a way of generating complex sounds digitally with the smallest number of computational operations per sound sample.
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120 Years of Electronic Music*
History of Electronic Music
