The History Of Electronic Musical Instruments Essay

, Research Paper

Electronic instruments and digital audio have changed the world s musical paradigm forever. The advent of consumer electronics in the 1920 s gave musicians and composers alike, the ability to both create new sounds and the devices to manipulate them by electrical means.

The 20th century has seen the vastest evolution of music styles and instruments, most of which have been heavily influenced by the electronic and digital mediums.

Since the early 1920 s many electronic renditions of acoustic instruments have become widely popular and available to the average musician. Instruments varying from electric guitars and basses, electronic pianos, synthesized drums and the ever popular drum machines and bass synthesizers including instruments that in themselves can create synthesis of multiple acoustic instruments and sounds by recreating the waveform (or shape of the sound waves) produced by playing them.

Electronics has not only offered a means to alter the sounds of already existing instruments, but also as a way to generate new sounds, effects, tones and timbres that would never be possible to be produced in a natural setting.

In the years following the first electronic instruments and synthesizers was what was called the Digital Era . Employing computers to do operations similar to that of electronic devices required conversion of an electronic signal, called an analogue signal, to a series of 1 s and 0 s that computers use to calculate information, hence the term digital.

Seeming that the computers allowed musicians to arrange synthesized sounds and samples (various snippets of a recording) in a way never before fathomable, it was only a natural reaction for it to expand itself manually.

Soon amateurs and musicians alike, were making types and genres of music never heard before by anyone in the mainstream media.

Therefore giving the average music listener a new musical experience. A description of such technology is what follows.

A Russian military scientist, Lev Termin in Petrograd (Now St. Petersburg) in 1919, while working on a means to locate enemy radio transmitters for the military using vacuum tubes, noticed that his body was able to detune the radio receiver he was working on, based upon the range of which he stood to it. Termin, being a trained classical cellist, immediately recognized the musical importance that his discovery held. He began playing several tunes for his colleagues, later creating the first prototype to be used as a musical instrument (later dubbed the Theremin , an anglicized version of Termin) the most amazing feature of this radio receiver turned musical instrument, was that to play it, didn t require a person to touch it! In order to use this alternative musical instrument, the musician would manipulate hand movements through two different electromagnetic fields (one changing pitch, the other changing the amplitude of sound.)

By the late 20 s the Theremin had been implemented in the works of many classical compositions and concert music. It s invention as the first electronic musical instrument inspired a whole new field of instrumentation, including the Ondes Martenot, the electric organ, and finally the synthesizers we use today. This invention discovered by complete mistake may have been the driving force or inspirational mechanism behind today s synthesizers. Perhaps it was ahead of its time, but a wide array of modern electronic sounds and devices can be accredited to this revolutionary invention by mistake.

The beginnings of actual electronic music began in the 1950s and 60s. The initial aim of this technology was to transmit, store, and reproduce the live experience of sound. Earlier in the century some electronic instruments of a limited capability were being invented and developed (i.e. The Theremin), the most familiar of these being the electronic organ. Others, such as the Ondes Martenot – an instrument producing sounds by means of an electronic oscillator and operated from a keyboard – used only occasionally in concert music. These nontraditional instruments were leading the way for future developments of electronic music.

Synthesizers provided the second step in this genre of musical devices. A synthesizer, built especially for making natural sounding sounds or “synthesis” and modification, is a device, which combines sound generators and sound modifiers all together in one, with a single control system. The first and most complex out of these synthesizers was the Electronic Music Synthesizer by RCA. It was first released in 1955. A more complicated model, the Mark II, was installed in 1959 at the Columbia University Studio in New York, and is still there today. It is an enormous machine that is capable of generating any imaginable sound or combination of them, with an infinite variety of pitches, durations, and rhythmic patterns far beyond the abilities of traditional instruments that we are familiar with. The Mark IIs ability was demonstrated in a recording called Milton Babbitt’s Ensembles for Synthesizer in 1964. The synthesizer represented an enormous step forward for the composer, because thay could now change all the characteristics of the sound beforehand by means of a punched paper tape, and therefore taking care of most of the time-consuming tasks associated with tape-recorder music. The development of smaller,