Martenot was inspired by the accidental overlaps of tones between military radio oscillators, and wanted to create an instrument with the expressiveness of the cello.

The French composer Olivier Messiaen used it in pieces such as his 1949 symphony Turangalîla-Symphonie, and his sister-in-law Jeanne Loriod was a celebrated player of the instrument.

[8] In 1937, the ondes Martenot was displayed at the Exposition Internationale de Paris with concerts and demonstrations in an ensemble setting with up to twelve ondists performing together at a time.

Sliding the ring along a wire produces "theremin-like" tones, generated by oscillator circuits using vacuum tubes,[2] or transistors in the seventh model.

Messiaen first used it in Fête des belles eaux, for six ondes,[27] and went on to use it in several more works, including Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine and Saint François d'Assise.

[9] Messiaen's widow, Yvonne Loriod, arranged and edited four unpublished Feuillets inédits for ondes Martenot and piano which were published in 2001.

[28] Other composers who used the instrument include Arthur Honegger, Claude Vivier, Darius Milhaud, Edgard Varèse, Marcel Landowski, Charles Koechlin, Florent Schmitt, Matyas Seiber, and Jacques Ibert.

[31] According to the New York Times, the ondes' most celebrated performer was the French musician Jeanne Loriod (1928–2001), who studied under Martenot at the Paris Conservatory.

[6] A British pupil of Jeanne Loriod, John Morton of Darlington (1931-2014), performed his own ondes instrument in works by Messiaen, Milhaud, Honegger and Bartok, amongst others, at the Royal Albert Hall and elsewhere in the 1970s, as well as on television and radio.

[2] On their 2001 album Amnesiac, they used the ondes martenot palm speaker to add a "halo of hazy reverberance" to Thom Yorke's vocals on the song "You and Whose Army?".

[35] The ondist Thomas Bloch toured in Tom Waits and Robert Wilson's show The Black Rider (2004–06)[36] and in Damon Albarn's opera "Monkey: Journey to the West" (2007–2013).

In 1936 Adolphe Borchard used it in Sacha Guitry's Le roman d'un tricheur, played by Martenot's sister, Ginette.

[40][better source needed] French composer Maurice Jarre introduced the ondes Martenot to American cinema in his score for Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

[41] Composer Harry Lubin created cues for The Loretta Young Show, One Step Beyond and The Outer Limits featured the instrument, as did the first-season Lost in Space (1965) theme by John Williams.

The English composer Richard Rodney Bennett used it for scores for films including Billion Dollar Brain (1967) and Secret Ceremony (1968).

[42] Elmer Bernstein learned about the ondes Martenot through Bennet, and used it in scores for films including Heavy Metal,[43] Ghostbusters,[44][45] The Black Cauldron,[45] Legal Eagles, The Good Son, and My Left Foot.

[46] The director Lucille Hadžihalilović used the ondes Martenot in her film Evolution (2015) as it "brings a certain melancholy, almost a human voice, and it instantly creates a particular atmosphere".

[47] Other film scores that use the ondes Martenot include A Passage to India, Amelie, Bodysong,[2] There Will Be Blood (2007), Hugo (2011)[48] and Manta Ray.

[50] It is used in a performance of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time in an episode from the third season of the Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle, where a musician plays the ondes Martenot to inmates on Rikers Island.

[4] In 1997, Mark Singer wrote for The Wire that it would likely remain obscure: "The fact is that any instrument with no institutional grounding of second- and third-raters, no spectral army of amateurs, will wither and vanish: how can it not?

Specialist virtuosos may arrive to tackle the one-off novelty ... but there's no meaningful level of entry at the ground floor, and, what's worse, no fallback possibility of rank careerism if things don't turn out.

[13] In 2000, Jonny Greenwood of the English rock band Radiohead commissioned the synthesiser company Analogue Systems to develop a replica of the ondes Martenot, as he was nervous about damaging his instrument on tour.

[3] In 2012, the Canadian company Therevox began selling a synthesizer with an interface based on the ondes Martenot pitch ring and intensity key.