PAPERS History of Electronic Sound Modification* HARALD BODE Bode Sound Co., North Tonawanda, NY 14120, USA 0 INTRODUCTION 2 THE ELECTRONIC ERA The history of electronic sound modification is as After the Telharmonium, and especially after the old as the history of electronic musical instruments and invention ofthe vacuum tube, scores of electronic (and electronic so und transmission, recording, and repro­ electronic mechanical) musical instruments were in­ duction. vented with sound modification features. The Harnmond Means for modifying electrically generated sound organ is of special interest, since it evolved from Cahill 's have been known since the late 19th century, when work. Many notable inventions in electronic sound Thaddeus Cahill created his Telharmonium. modification are associated with this instrument, which With the advent of the electronic age, spurred first will be discussed later. by the invention of the electron tube, and the more Other instruments of the early 1930s included the recent development of solid-state devices, an astounding Trautonium by the German F. Trautwein, which was variety of sound modifiers have been created for fil­ built in several versions. The Trautonium used reso­ tering, distorting, equalizing, amplitude and frequency nance filters to emphasize selective overtone regions, modulating, Doppler effect and ring modulating, com­ called formants [ 11]-[ 14]. In contrast, the German Jörg pressing, reverberating, repeating, fianging, phasing, Mager built an organlike instrument for which he used pitch changing, chorusing, frequency shifting, ana­ loudspeakers with all types of driver systems and shapes lyzing, and resynthesizing natural and artificial sound. to obtain different sounds. In this paper some highlights of historical devel­ In 1937 the author created the Warbo Formant organ, opment are reviewed, covering the time from 1896 to which had circuitry for envelope shaping as well as the present. more complex filters than those used before. It had two sets of filters and a four-voice assignment keyboard 1 THE ELECTROMECHANICAL ERA [15] through which, for instance, voices 1 and 3 could To give a more complete account on this history, it be assigned to the first filter and voices 2 and 4 to the second filter (Fig. 2). By making the pass regions of is important to include the time span that preceded the the filters mutually exclusive, complementary tone purely electronic era, and also to include some history colors could be produced, which sounded very pleasing of electronic (and electrical) instruments whose sound to the ear [16], [17] . modification devices formed an integral part of the In the late 1930s the Harnmond Novachord was cre­ entire system. ated, which also had formant filters for overtone mod­ A classic case is the Telharmonium, by Thaddeus ification and envelope shaping to produce tones like Cahill (Fig. 1), which was built around 1896 [1]-[10]. those of wind and string instruments [18], [19]. This instrument used the principle of additive tone An interesting means of sound modification is found synthesis for sound manipulation and modification. The in the Electrochord by Oscar Vierling [ 16] and in the individual tone colors were built up from fundamentals Miessner piano [20]-[23] . It was found that tonal qual­ and overtones, generated by huge dynamos. For the ities could be dramatically modified by changing the purpose of generatingpure sine waves for the synthesis, location of pickups (in this case capacitive) along the the individual generator coils were tuned with capac­ strings. For instance, when picking up the oscillations itors, another means of sound modification. at the midpoint, all even harmonics would disappear, leaving only the odd harmonics, thus producing a hol­ * Based on papers presented at the Midwest Acoustics low, clarinetlike sound. Placing the pickup at one third Conference, Chicago, 1981 April 25 and at the 70th Con­ vention of the Audio Engineering Society, New York, 1981 of the string' s length, the third, sixth, and so forth Oct. 30-Nov. 2). Manuscript received 1984 June 18. harmonics would be canceled, and pickup points at 730 J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 32, No. 10, 1984 October PAPERS HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC SOUND MODIFICATION other locations of the string length would produce yet and the frequency-modulated signals, a type of choral different harmonic structures. effect was produced [28]. This laid the foundation for The Electrochord as weil as the Miessner piano were today's phasers. In the mid l950s W. C. Wayne, Jr. , built without sounding boards, thus eliminating their proposed and built a purely electronic choral tone damping effect and producing tones with Ionger decay modulator for the Baldwin organ [29]. A different ap­ times. The samewas true for the Les Paul guitar, and proach for choral tonemodulationwas taken by D. L. it might be interesting to learn that Paul invented the Bonharn in the early 1960s [30], after he had created solid-body guitar as far back as 1927 [24]. In his early successfully a purely electronic vibrato modulator in experiments Paul used the magnets of the old-style 1958 [31] . headphones, which were equipped with steel diaphragms A unique contribution in sound modification devices as membranes. The Gibson guitar evolved in 1941 , and was made by Homer Dudley through his creation of it has since been associated with an incredible number the voder and the vocoder in the late 1930s. and variety of sound modification devices and methods, The voder [32] was a keyboard-operated instrument some of which will be discussed in more detail. controlling a number of bandpass channels for simu­ From the beginning one important means of sound lating the resonances of the human voice. With the modification has been the tremolo and the vibrato, the addition of a tone source called the buzz source and a tremolo being an amplitude modulation [25] and the noise source called the hiss source, vowels and con­ vibrato a frequency modulation. It is interesting to note sonants of a speaker were imitated. that post-source frequency modulation initially posed The system became even more exciting when the a problem. For this reason the first Harnmond organs voder, being an encoder, was combined with a decoder. were equipped with means for amplitude modulation This combination was called the vocoder, which com­ or tremolo. prised an analyzer for analyzing the speech and a syn­ In the mid-1940s a delay line with variable inductors thesizer for remaking the same speech [33], [34]. was invented by Hanert, and after this a different type For accomplishing this, the audio range was sliced of variable delay line with a number of delay taps and up into a number of bandpass channels in the analyzer, a capacitive scannerwas incorporated in the Harnmond which correspond to an equal number of bandpass organ (Figs. 3 and 4) [26], [27] . By combining direct channels in the synthesizer. In each analyzer channel f!IE KF:YR!)ARD !)F 1"1!F !XST!H \IEXT F0R Pl<ODl"CIXr. ;!tSIC !lY L'.H'TR!C!TY l' •t• ,q • ;e n -n --;• n! tt r,f a p:J.'"'!iNl1 ~r ~tf'!l-"i~ Thc '\"lhr~t .:r>rt'" make tt'me inn •t:k•,hmw r~ch~t:'r t~e ot , t'r' ('"l 1 of a wirc ''Ottrw Lrg r T e :to •• 'I t~H' .--1+1cn 1~if+' t e 'ffM't>ni gf"r.tratcr prv uu• t'i(' ,-Hff(·run c m tht• 'l ite rou m 4 t>at e ~ v Ime L;e r' m r r -~.~ u tt ·-~· • lq; fHi(~ •--vt '1 y milf"S a' ay Fig. I. Playing console of Cahill Telharmonium (courtesy Tom Rhea). J . Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 32, No. 10, 1984 October 731 BODE PAPERS a control voltage is generated with what we now call [36]-[38]. an envelope follower. This control voltage was then A unique instrument combining many of the means fed to the control voltage input of a voltage-controlled of tone generation and sound modification known at amplifier in the corresponding synthesizer channel. that time was the RCA synthesizer (Fig. 6), which was By listening to the recordings of the Dudley vocoder created under Harry F. Olson. It made its debut in 1955 one notices that not only the speech articulation is being [39]-( 41] . The RCA synthesizer is controlled by pre­ remade but also the speech infiection, which clearly programmed punched tape. It has such features as dig­ indicates the presence of a pitch extractor-that itally controlled filters, control of attack and decay works -as well as a pitch-to-voltage converter and a envelopes, digitally controlled pitch and waveshapes, voltage-controlled oscillator. In the closing section of random noise generation, and frequency and amplitude this article a few more aspects, modifications, and ap­ modulation. plications of the vocoder will be discussed. Around the same time Les Paul became famous with Thus far it has been observed that one important his multitrack guitar recordings, using tape speed element in sound modification devices is represented transposition and the repetition effect. The well-known by a variety of filters, such as the formant filters of the piece "Whispering" wasdonein the early 1950s. Be­ Trautonium and the Harnmond Novachord, the com­ sides being an outstanding performer, Paul is an out­ plementary tone filters of the Warbo Formant organ, standing innovator. He introduced the multitrack re­ and the bandpass filters of the vocoder. Another in­ corder [eight tracks on I-inch (25-mm) tape] in coop­ strument with strong formant filterswas the Bode Mel­ eration with Ampex. He also created Sei Sync. His ochord (Fig. 5) (preceded by the Melodium) [35], which repetition effect was done with a fi ve-head recorder. was built for several major broadcast stations in West Histapespeeds were initially 60 and 30 in/s ( 1.52 and Germany by the late 1940s and the early 1950s.