History of Electronic Music

c ~. HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC TEACHER UNIT GUIDE NOTES EARLY DEVELOPMENTS Telharmonium One of the first electronic instruments was built between 1897 and 1906 by Thaddeus Cahill (1867-1934). Called the Telharmonium, the instrument was an immense structure weighing about 200 tons and extremely expensive to produce. Itoccupied the entire floor of "Telharmonic Hall" in New York City for about twenty years, and a "portable" version took up thirty railroad boxcars. Itconsisted of a series of specially geared shafts connected to electric inductors (devices that produce electricity) which produced various alternating currents whose frequencies were set to match the desired pitches. The instrument was polyphonic (i.e., capable of playing multiple notes simultaneously) and was controlled by a set of velocity-sensitive keyboards. The actual sound was produced by a series of telephone receivers fitted with special acoustic horns. Cahill envisioned a plan to transmit music from the Telharmonium through the telephone network to hotels, restaurants, and private homes. Due to numerous difficulties the venture did not succeed. Although this visionary achievement in electronic music was soon largely forgotten, the design principles were later used in the Hammond Organ. His vision for transmitting music over phone lines has been realized with current technologies including "Muzak" and the internet. Theremin The Theremin was invented in 1919 by Leon Theremin (1896-1993) and remains popular in experimental and electronic music circles today. Developed in Russia, the first production model of the Theremin was introduced to the public at the Moscow Industrial Fair in 1920. A few companies still manufacture Theremins, including Big Briar, owned by Robert Moog (of the Moog synthesizer). Its design included two metal antennae: a horizontal loop to control volume and a vertical rod to control pitch. The instrument is played by moving one's hands in the air around the loop and the rod. The closer each hand gets to its antenna, the higher the pitch or the higher the volume. The sound output is a continuous monophonic tone that resembles a female voice or violin string sound. An excellent listening example can be found on the Beach Boys song, "Good Vibrations." Hammond Organ The Hammond Organ was invented by Laurens Hammond in 1935. Like the Telharmonium, it used mechanical means to create electric signals of various frequencies, but it was able to do so in a fairly compact instrument. Various timbres were achieved as the fundamental and up to eight harmonics were controlled by means of preset keys or manually through a series of drawbars. Each harmonic is added as its corresponding drawbar is pulled out. A Hammond console organ included two 61-key manuals (keyboards) and a 25-note pedal board. The lower manual is called the Great and the upper is the SwelL The Model B-3 Hammond Organ became very popular with jazz and rock groups in the 1970s (e.g., Chicago; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Jimmy Smith). Musique Concrete Musique Concrete was an approach to music production developed primarily by Frenchmen Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the late 1940s and 1950s. Their music was created by manipulation of recordings of natural acoustic sounds. Their early work was done on vinyl recordings, but when the tape recorder was developed, it proved to be a more flexible medium. Their techniques included changing tape speed or direction, tape looping, tape splicing, and addition of external electronic effects like filters or reverb. Many of the techniques that they pioneered are still used in one form or another in today's studios. Current examples include the 'rap' technique of "scratching" records, the use of pre-produced libraries of drum beat loops in 'house' music, and the 'remix technique of digitally rearranging and adding parts to an existing song. Early Electronic Music At the same time that the French were working with musique concrete, a studio in Germany was developing a different approach. Their goal was to create music by purely electronic means without the use of recorded sound. The most famous composer at this studio was Karlheinz Stockhausen. Many of the approaches and devices used in the German studio became the building blocks for the development of music synthesizers. Les Paul, Inventor of the Electric Guitar and Multitrack Recording The name Les Paul is probably most recognized for the electric guitar named after him. He designed and built the first solid body electric guitar in 1941, and in 1952 the Gibson Company agreed to produce and market the instrument. The Gibson "Les Paul" was the best-selling guitar in the world for many years and is still a popular choice for professional guitarists. In 1948, Capitol Records released a single consisting of two songs by Les PauL The record was the first to employ multitrack recording. Working in his home studio, Paul developed a way to synchronize eight separate tape recorders together. This allowed him to record multiple parts, one at a time, while listening to previously recorded tracks. Paul sold the design concept for the eight-track tape recorder in 1954, and by the late 1950s manufacturers were seriously marketing multitrack recording decks. The RCA Synthesizer The first true studio synthesizer, in the modern sense, was the RCA Synthesizer (Mark 1). Itwas introduced in 1955 and was also called the Olson-Belar sound synthesizer after it's inventors, Harry Olson and Herbert Belar. It was a large instrument (virtually filling the studio) and was a complete modular system that could generate, modify, process, record and play back complex sounds. Initially RCA had envisioned commercial applications for the instrument, hoping to use it to imitate traditional instruments for the purpose of popular music production. However, composers like Milton Babbitt, Otto Luening, and Vladimir Ussachevsky saw the potential for serious electronic and experimental music composition. This led to the establishment of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City. The RCA Mark 2 Synthesizer, an improved version of the instrument, was funded by RCA and installed at the Columbia-Princeton studio in 1959. Like its predecessor, it was a non-real-time instrument; that is, a performer could not simply sit down to play the instrument. The composer would encode each desired sound onto binary-coded paper tape. This tape would be fed into the synthesizer which would then interpret the coding and play the sounds. This was the first instrument that was actually called a "synthesizer" . THE AGE OF MODERN SYNTHESIS Moog Synthesizer With the arrival of the affordable transistor, a revolution in the design of electronic musical instruments began in the mid-1960s. The most important development of that period was Robert Moog's invention of the Moog Synthesizer. (The name Moog should be pronounced so that it rhymes with vogue.) Moog's approach was to take all of the modules that form the basic building blocks ofelectronic sound (oscillators, amplifiers, envelope generators, filters, etc.) and put them together into one box which was called a modular synthesizer. To create a sound, the synthesist would manually set the knobs of each module to the desired settings, and then would connect the modules together into various configurations using short wires called patch cords. (Each particular configuration was referred to as a "patch," and although patch cords are no longer used in synths, the term patch is still used to refer to a sound on a synth.) Once a patch was created, notes could be played from the keyboard in real time. The only way to remember a patch was to draw a diagram of the module settings and patch cord connections. (Not until the 1970s did synthesizers come pre-wired with typical configurations, allowing the user to store sounds and recall them instantaneously.) The instrument was monophonic; that is, it could only play one note at a time. The only way to create chords or polyphony was to make multiple passes (overdubs) on a multitrack tape recorder. A famous example of one such recording of the Moog Synthesizer is Wendy Carlos' S'witched-On Bach, recorded in 1968. With this innovative electronic interpretation ofJ. S. Bach's music, the word synthesizer quickly became a household word. The record was one of the fastest-selling classical albums at the time of its release and remains one of the best-selling electronic music recordings of all time. It generated an interest in synthesizers that soon led to their use in many genres of music. Digital Technology in an Analog World The components in the Moog Synthesizer were analog, voltage-controlled components. Through the 1970s, more and more synthesizers began using digital components. The difference between analog and digital is that analog allows for completely continuous change while digital, being based on numbers, changes by discrete steps. An example of analog is a clock with a sweep second hand. The hand moves continuously through all points between each second. A digital clock, on the other hand, displays time as a series of numbers, moving discretely from one second to the next with no steps in between. Another way to understand the difference between analog and digital is to think of a light fixture with two switches-a dimmer switch and a 3-way switch. The dimmer switch is analog- the amount of light is continuously adjustable. The 3 way switch is digital-there are only three possibilities with no steps in between. Analog synthesizer components are capable of producing continuous electrical changes or fluctuations that are directly analogous to the audio signal. Digital components, on the other hand, store and retrieve information about a sound in the form of numbers. When an analog signalis digitized, the signal is quantized (rounded off) into discrete steps and stored as a series of numbers.

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