Electronic musical instrument

An electronic instrument might include a user interface for controlling its sound, often by adjusting the pitch, frequency, or duration of each note.

For example, in Galpin's 1937 book A Textbook of European Musical Instruments, he lists electrophones with three second-level divisions for sound generation ("by oscillation", "electro-magnetic", and "electro-static"), as well as third-level and fourth-level categories based on the control method.

Thus, in the broadest sense, the first electrified musical instrument was the Denis d'or keyboard, dating from 1753, followed shortly by the clavecin électrique by the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste de Laborde in 1761.

[5][6] The "Musical Telegraph" was a chance by-product of his telephone technology when Gray discovered that he could control sound from a self-vibrating electromagnetic circuit and so invented a basic oscillator.

This was the first thermionic valve, or vacuum tube and which led to the generation and amplification of electrical signals, radio broadcasting, and electronic computation, among other things.

[7][8] Hugh Le Caine, John Hanert, Raymond Scott, composer Percy Grainger (with Burnett Cross), and others built a variety of automated electronic-music controllers during the late 1940s and 1950s.

[9] This workshop was also responsible for the theme to the TV series Doctor Who a piece, largely created by Delia Derbyshire, that more than any other ensured the popularity of electronic music in the UK.

Using tonewheels to generate musical sounds as electrical signals by additive synthesis, it was capable of producing any combination of notes and overtones, at any dynamic level.

[11] It was invented in 1928 by the French cellist Maurice Martenot, who was inspired by the accidental overlaps of tones between military radio oscillators, and wanted to create an instrument with the expressiveness of the cello.

[11][12] The French composer Olivier Messiaen used the ondes Martenot in pieces such as his 1949 symphony Turangalîla-Symphonie, and his sister-in-law Jeanne Loriod was a celebrated player.

[14] Contemporary users of the ondes Martenot include Tom Waits, Daft Punk and the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood.

The first commercially manufactured synthesizer was the Novachord, built by the Hammond Organ Company from 1938 to 1942, which offered 72-note polyphony using 12 oscillators driving monostable-based divide-down circuits, basic envelope control and resonant low-pass filters.

Designed by Herbert Belar and Harry Olson at RCA, with contributions from Vladimir Ussachevsky and Peter Mauzey, it was installed at Columbia University in 1957.

Harald Bode, Don Buchla, Hugh Le Caine, Raymond Scott and Paul Ketoff were among the first to build such instruments, in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

[17] Robert Moog, who had been a student of Peter Mauzey and one of the RCA Mark II engineers, created a synthesizer that could reasonably be used by musicians, designing the circuits while he was at Columbia-Princeton.

[19] Further standardized the design of subsequent synthesizers with its integrated keyboard, pitch and modulation wheels and VCO->VCF->VCA signal flow.

Popular electronic keyboards combining organ circuits with synthesizer processing included the ARP Omni and Moog's Polymoog and Opus 3.

[21] For the first time, musicians had a practical polyphonic synthesizer that could save all knob settings in computer memory and recall them at the touch of a button.

There followed a pair of smaller, preset versions, the CE20 and CE25 Combo Ensembles, targeted primarily at the home organ market and featuring four-octave keyboards.

The Kurzweil K250, first produced in 1983, was also a successful polyphonic digital music synthesizer,[36] noted for its ability to reproduce several instruments synchronously and having a velocity-sensitive keyboard.

[37] An important new development was the advent of computers for the purpose of composing music, as opposed to manipulating or creating sounds.

Iannis Xenakis began what is called musique stochastique, or stochastic music, which is a method of composing that employs mathematical probability systems.

Xenakis used graph paper and a ruler to aid in calculating the velocity trajectories of glissando for his orchestral composition Metastasis (1953–54), but later turned to the use of computers to compose pieces like ST/4 for string quartet and ST/48 for orchestra (both 1962).

[38] In 1957, Max Mathews at Bell Lab wrote MUSIC-N series, a first computer program family for generating digital audio waveforms through direct synthesis.

By placing and manipulating blocks called tangibles on the table surface, while interacting with the visual display via finger gestures, a virtual modular synthesizer is operated, creating music or sound effects.

Custom software allows the pads to be indefinitely programmed individually or by groups in terms of function, note, and pressure parameter among many other settings.

The primary concept of the AlphaSphere is to increase the level of expression available to electronic musicians, by allowing for the playing style of a musical instrument.

In 1966, Reed Ghazala discovered and began to teach math "circuit bending"—the application of the creative short circuit, a process of chance short-circuiting, creating experimental electronic instruments, exploring sonic elements mainly of timbre and with less regard to pitch or rhythm, and influenced by John Cage’s aleatoric music concept.

[41] Much of this manipulation of circuits directly, especially to the point of destruction, was pioneered by Louis and Bebe Barron in the early 1950s, such as their work with John Cage on the Williams Mix and especially in the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet.

Nowadays many schematics can be found to build noise generators such as the Atari Punk Console or the Dub Siren as well as simple modifications for children toys such as the Speak & Spell that are often modified by circuit benders.