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Home , Electronic keyboard, Electronic piano, Hammond organ, Loudspeaker, Musical instrument, Piano

m8a, 6/7/94

CHAPTER 8

ELECTRONIC MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS AND DEVICES

Before ab out 1920, all the world's work was accomplished by mechanical moving parts. But

the development of the vacuum tub e { for { op ened an entirely new area

of other applications. With the ability to amplify small and generate new signals

of almost any and shap e, many things involving information handling and

pro cessing, formerly done mechanically, could now b e done electrically with enormous

advantages in sp eed and cost.

By 1930 the existed by which new musical instruments were p ossible, in

which the notes, of any pitch and tone quality could b e generated electrically. What was

oscillating was not , b oard, or air column; but only an electric currentor

voltage in some circuit; but after pro cessing it electrically in almost any conceivable way

and for any purp ose, the nal result could b e made audible by the loudsp eakers develop ed

for radio. The list of p otential advantages for keyb oard instruments is impressive:

1 Even large variations in temp erature and humiditywould no longer throwanin-

strument out of tune.

2 One has a much wider variety of pitch and available, so that a single instru-

ment can b e made to serve, at the player's will, the musical functions of a ,

, clavier, organ, , , etc..

3 The qualityasamusical instrument can b e fully as great { actually far greater {

than that of any mechanical instrument. Go o d timbre can b e maintained over a

much greater than is p ossible in any acoustical instrument.

4 The instruments can b e much more reliable; broken strings, hammers, worn out

felts, cracked soundb oards, are things of the past.

5 The instruments can b e smaller and lighter and much less exp ensive.

One would think that, with all these obvious advantages, they would b e exploited at once,

and bynow a revolution in keyb oard instruments should have b een long since accomplished.

But sadly, our task here is not to explain how these wonderful things are done to day; rather,

wemust try to understand why they have not yet b een done in spite of our full technical

capability of doing them.

Perhaps the rst commercial electrical instrument to b e made in any quantitywas

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the of the 1930's. The sound of it b ecame familiar to everyone in the

1940's b ecause it was promoted so vigorously. A radio commercial, played thousands of

times, featured a p erformer named Ethel Smith, playing on a Hammond organ the

of a current little with a Spanish avor, \Ticho{Ticho", whose praised the

reliable little cucko o in a clo ck. rep eated day and night with such maddening

regularity that every note and intonation of it is burned p ermanently into my memory.

The sound was utterly unlike that of any real organ, and was closer to what would b e called

to day, \vib es." The main result of this saturation advertising campaign was that, although

relatively few p eople ever saw a Hammond organ, everyone could whistle \Ticho{Ticho".

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For a comprehensive review of the state of the art at that time, see B. F. Meissner 1936.

Technical details of the Hammond organ are given by L. Hammond 1939.

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The Hammond organ technology seems to day to b e almost of the stone age; to see

how far wehave advanced, we note that in a small part of it the twelve highest notes

were generated by a rotating shaft carrying twelve cogwheels with approximately the right

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numb er of cogs, which induced oscillating electric currents in twelve placed

near them. Then a cascade of vacuum tub e frequency dividers generated the lower o ctave

signals from these, after which many other vacuum tub e circuits are needed to supply

the upp er partials by b orrowing in the prop er prop ortions the voltages in the circuits

b elonging to higher o ctaves. Finally, eachkey must have a to turn on the prop er

note, after which they are all combined and ampli ed to loudsp eaker level.

Thus merely to generate all the required pitches { b efore wehaveeven started to

generate the prop er { required apparatus that weighed p erhaps thirty p ounds with

the motor to drive the shaft and the p ower supply for the vacuum tub es, must have cost

ab out $200 in 1940 dollars to manufacture, consumed ab out 100 watts of p ower; and was

highly unreliable, with a dozen p otential failure p oints. Today, all of this is accomplished

by a single containing thousands of on a semiconductor chip

ab out the size of an aspirin tablet, which consumes ab out a milliwatt of p ower and costs

ab out one dollar in 1990 dollars { p erhaps 15 cents in 1940 currency { to manufacture;

and has spacecraft reliability.Thus has technology advanced in ftyyears.

Despite all its technical and musical shortcomings, the fact that the Hammond organ

was the pioneer of a new eld made many regard it with a ection, and surviving instru-

ments maintained in working order are b ecoming valuable antiques. Indeed, there is an

active market in these old see the p ersonal ads in the back of such p erio dicals as Keyb oard

magazine. Hammond organs are b eing o ered for sale at over $4,000.

Other makes of electric organs Lowry,Schob er, etc. app eared, op erating on other

principles and pro ducing quite di erent . Some of these used authentic Rub e Gold-

b erg devices; in one the e ect of , which could have b een pro duced so easily elec-

trically if one wanted it, was made instead by the astonishingly crude, ine ective, and

costly metho d of mechanically rotating the sp eaker so that it faced alternatively toward

and away from the listener!

With the advent of solid{state and integrated circuits in the 1960's, all

these early e orts b ecame obsolete. It could all b e done now with sup erior p erformance, in

awayvastly easier, cheap er, and more reliable. Again one would have exp ected high quality

electronic to app ear. Indeed, an attempt at this was made by the Baldwin piano

company, and for a time the result was also promoted by radio commercials, now featuring

Glenn Gould playing Bach on the in contrast, the famous E.

Power Biggs refused to p erform on any electronic organ.

The writer, after manyyears of playing a Bosendorfer grand, acquired one of these

electronic Baldwins largely out of curiosity; and found it so unacceptable as a musical

instrument that one could not understand why the Baldwin Company had b othered to

manufacture it at all, much less why they would allow their name to b e put on it. The tone

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Exercise for you to p onder: explain why it is not p ossible, with this , to pro duce an

exact equal temp ered scale, although an eight{note is p ossible. Thus the Hammond

organ pro duced thirds smo other than equal temp ered thirds, at the price of making some other

intervals worse.

Chap. 8: ELECTRONIC MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS AND DEVICES 803

qualityvaried greatly across the keyb oard and at no p ointwas it anything like acceptable

piano sound. The sound was so mued by insucient content { particularly in

the { that it was almost imp ossible to recognize a note unless it was played staccato.

Glenn Gould's p erformances partially hid this defect b ecause he played everything staccato

anyway. Not only in articulation, but also in maximum volume and dynamic range { all of

whichwould have b een trivially easy to accomplish electrically { it was hop elessly de cient,

in a way that could not b e corrected byany further ampli cation or ltering of the output.

Although it was in a sense also a pioneer in a new eld, nob o dy could regard it with

a ection and it will never b ecome a valuable antique.

More recently, other manufacturers { Roland, Kurzweil, , Yamaha { pro duced

p ortable electronic piano keyb oards, of which the writer pro ceeded to acquire a 1985

vintage Roland HP{100, and a 1992 Yamaha YPP{50. They showed a slight, almost

negligible improvement in quality. The Roland went to the opp osite extreme of to o much

harmonic content in the bass, making it sound cheap and tinny, while the treble notes had

a shrill, unpleasant p eanut{whistle quality.At least, the balance b etween bass and treble

was acceptable.

The Yamaha actually approached acceptable piano sound in the bass, for p erhaps

the rst time in any electronic piano, but now pro duced dull treble notes with insucient

harmonic content, lacking the brilliance of piano sound. Astonishingly, the user was given

no way of controlling brilliance, although the Roland o ered this in a sequence of steps.

Even worse, the Yamaha preserved the worst defect of the acoustical piano, ab out which

Johann Sebastian Bach had complained already in the rst piano { bad balance across

the keyb oard, with b o oming bass and weak treble, just the opp osite of what a go o d piano

ought to give us for reasons explained in Chapter 3.

Equally exasp erating, the volume could not b e turned up to normal piano

without great deterioration in { what the exp erienced hi{ ear recognizes

at once as due to nonlinearity in the electronics. It would have b een so easy to

design the electronics to give greater dynamic range than an acoustic piano without de-

parting from go o d piano tone; but in fact, it had far less range, making e ective crescendos

almost imp ossible. In addition, the decaywas far to o fast, making it almost imp ossible

to playanything the designers were apparently unaware that an acoustical piano

note has two decays; a fast and a slow one, and any acceptable electronic instrumentmust

duplicate b oth of them.

In short, like the proverbial Japanese tailor, the Yamaha piano keyb oard faithfully

copied the defects of the acoustical piano, while failing to copy its go o d features. But

we found that this could b e comp ensated, bringing the result up to the b order{line of

acceptability,by passing the output through a hi{ ampli er set for maximum treble

emphasis and bass suppression.

Although it is p ossible to do anything electrically millions of times faster than me-

chanically, in all of these attempts at an electronic piano the resp onse is so sluggish that it

is imp ossible to execute a trill at anything like the sp eed of an acoustical piano. It seems

to us that there is something delib erately p erverse in the design of those circuits or the

keys in particular, the lack of tactile sense of when the rises to the p oint where it

can b e rep eated, and rate of key rise when the nger is removed; p erhaps this needs to b e sp eeded up.

804

In addition, there is something to o `rigidly xed' ab out the sound of the ab ove elec-

tronic pianos; the original acoustical piano has a kind of exibility and expressivenness that

they all lack. Perhaps the stretched o ctaves of acoustical pianos actually give an enhanced

melo dic quality to the high notes. Bear in mind also that on an acoustical piano a more

loudly struck note automatically has not only a greater brilliance harmonic content but

also a slightly higher pitch the average tension on the string is increased by the greater

of its motion, which stretches the string just as would tightening the p eg bya

tiny amount. Of course, if psychological exp eriments should show that this is indeed an

imp ortant factor in musical expressiveness, it could b e duplicated electronically.

However, with all their defects, the quality of electronic keyb oards of the typ e discussed

ab ove, is already ab out equal to that of the cheap est `' acoustical pianos. And the

price of the former comes down while that of the latter continually increases; the spinet

piano is already more exp ensive than an electronic keyb oard of comparable musical quality,

so we think that the low{end spinet pianos are headed for swift obsolescence. But the

high{quality acoustical grand piano is as yet unthreatened.

In summary, there is no technical reason why one cannot make an electronic piano

that has a musical quality surpassing the nest grand, can b e folded up and carried

as easily as a , has all the ab ove practical advantages, and sells for ab out the same

price as the TV { VCR combination in most living ro oms. But the history of attempts

to pro duce this much{needed instrument is one of p ersistent failure to achieveeven the

most elementary necessities of a piano from a musical standp oint. We do not yet haveany

electronic instrument { of whatever size and price { that is a satisfactory substitute for a

go o d acoustical grand piano.

This is not a failure of our currently available technology; it is a human failure. The en-

gineers who designed those instruments, although they presumably knew their electronics,

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simply lacked the musical p erceptiveness to comprehend what is imp ortant in a piano.

Since the electronic keyb oard manufacturers never pro duced a satisfactory piano, they

never attracted many buyers and their interest shifted to other electronic instruments of

the \" genre. Here the attempt to imitate a piano was abandoned, and one

concentrated instead on sp ecial e ects that are p ossible only in an electronic instrument.

In 1993 rather elab orate synthesizer keyb oards could b e b ought for ab out $2,500. A new

synthesizer is the Yamaha VL{1; it can repro duce a quite realistic ob o e sound, and also

crazy things likea\bowed ute". Indeed, can pro duce an amazing variety

of weird sounds made to order by the user, and thus make instructive demonstrations of

some principles of and sound p erception. But in our view there is no musical

reason to want suchweird e ects, so these devices are exp ensivetoys, not serious musical

instruments.

It is problematical whether this situation will ever b e corrected, short of a new pro-

ducer entering the eld with a new philosophy.We think that only a p erson who has in

the same head a thorough understanding of b oth electronics and classical piano music { at

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Worse, the writer knows one comp etent electronic engineer for whom the terms \music" and

\ro ck and roll" are synonymous. I do not think that this musical illiterate has any conception of

what is; he app ears never to haveever heard a Beethoven sonata, or even to know

what that means, or who Beethoven was.

Chap. 8: ELECTRONIC MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS AND DEVICES 805

the level of actual comp etent p erformance { can do for the piano what Theobald Bohm

did for the ute; so the high quality acoustical grand piano will continue to b e with us for

many more years. It might remain the instrumentofchoice almost inde nitely if some of

the improvements noted in Chapter 6 were made.

MIDI

However, another intriguing p ossibility is b eginning to app ear, developing in a di erent

direction than the synthesizer, in the passage of music through , in which the

musical resp onse is determined by the particular that is controlling the .

The MIDI  Digital Interface system carries full information ab out

what the player is doing on a piano keyb oard, essentially instantaneously,over a single

coaxial cable, making it p ossible to accomplish the functions of keyb oard, piano ,

and sound pro duction in three separate and separated comp onents, each of which can b e

designed separately for anynumb er of di erent purp oses.

For eachkey, a is sent indicating the pitch, the exact time of key depression

and release, and the velo city of the key at the p oint ab out 2/3 of the waydown where

the escap ementwould disconnect the hammer from the key on a conventional piano. This

provides all the information that is available to the Erard piano action, therefore it must b e

p ossible for a computer, given that information, to reconstruct everything the Erard action

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do es. Equally well, one can make the computer do anything else one maywant with that

information, which no instrument has ever b een able to do b efore. Once this information is

available as input to a computer, then merely by writing di erent software, one can make

the computer pro cess it in anywaywe please, to pro duce anyvolume, timbre, attack and

decay pattern, wewant; and these parameters maybechosen di erently for di erentkeys,

repro ducing the piano's bass, midrange, and treble resp onse and repro ducing the piano's

variation of timbre with loudness, if that is what wewant. With exp erience, one could

surely make the computer deliver resp onse far sup erior to what the Erard action gives.

With the MIDI interfaces a single keyb oard could suce, once and for all, to emulate

anynumb er of di erentmusical instruments. A single hi{ sp eaker system suces, once

and for all, to deliver any sound the human ear is capable of p erceiving. The individuality

of the instrumentwould b e determined entirely by the computer mo dule connected b etween

them, which can b e replaced with a di erent one at any time or more easily, one replaces

the software with new kinds. Obsolescence itself would b e a thing of the past.

RECORDING

The place where mo dern technology { electronic and otherwise { has made a really big

and valuable impact on music is, of course, in the making of recordings, which started with

Thomas Edison's wax cylinders. These mechanical/acoustical arrived to o late to

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Or, for that matter, what the Stein or Streicher pianos, Beethoven's Broadwo o d, the Spath

non{piano, the Cristofori piano, or the harpsichord did; or what the organ or xylophone do now,

since the MIDI information includes everything that they use concerning what the player is doing.

But, interestingly, one could not emulate the , which makes use of extra information

variation of nger pressure on the key after it has sounded that the present MIDI system do es not transmit.

806 8: RECORDING

preserve the p erformances of Liszt, but just in time for others such as Enrico Caruso and

Camille Saint{Saens. The play{back machines were of wretched musical qualitybytoday's

standards, but with their long aring horns, often imitating trump ets or owers, they had

avery elegant app earance, t for the nest salons. Probably the world's greatest collection

of fancy old and gramophone machines is in the museum at Burgdorf near

Bern, .

With the invention of the electrical all the existing electrical technology

could b e applied at once to development of b oth radio and greatly sup erior recording

devices. These evolved from the wax cylinder to at 78 RPM disks to 33 1/3 RMP

disks, to tap e recorders, and nally to our present laser{op erated Compact Disks with

digital computer electronics, which seem to leave nothing to b e desired as far as qualityof

repro duction is concerned. We doubt whether anyb o dy's ear is able to distinguish b etween

a live p erformance and a repro duction on a mo dern hi{ system prop erly set up.

Musicians need to know a little ab out this technology in order to make go o d recordings

of their own p erformances. Reverb eration, etc. ************ MORE HERE ON RECORDINGS ***************************