9

In 1919, Russian inventor Leon Theremin took a markedly different approach. Named
after the man who masterminded it, the monophonic Theremin was played without
actually touching the instrument. It gauged the proximity of the player’s hands, as they
were waved about in an electrostatic field between two antennae, and used this
information to generate sound. This unorthodox technique made the Theremin
enormously difficult to play. Its eerie, spine-tingling (but almost unvarying) timbre made
it a favorite on countless horror movie soundtracks. Incidentally, R. A. Moog, whose
synthesizers would later garner worldwide fame, began to build Theremins at the tender
age of 19.
In Europe, the Frenchman Maurice Martenot devised the monophonic Ondes Martenot
in 1928. The sound generation method of this instrument was akin to that of the Theremin,
but in its earliest incarnation it was played by pulling a wire back and forth.
In Berlin during the 1930s, Friedrich Trautwein and Oskar Sala worked on the Trautonium,
an instrument that was played by pressing a steel wire onto a bar. Depending on the
player’s preference, it enabled infinitely variable pitches—much like a fretless stringed
instrument—or incremental pitches similar to that of a keyboard instrument. Sala
continued to develop the instrument throughout his life, an effort culminating in the
two-voice Mixturtrautonium in 1952. He scored numerous industrial films, as well as the
entire soundtrack of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece “The Birds,” with this instrument.
Although the movie does not feature a conventional musical soundtrack, all bird calls
and the sound of beating wings heard in the movie were generated on the
Mixturtrautonium.
In Canada, Hugh Le Caine began to develop his Electronic Sackbut in 1945. The design
of this monophonic instrument resembled that of a synthesizer, but it featured an
enormously expressive keyboard, which responded not only to key velocity and pressure
but also to lateral motion.
The instruments discussed thus far were all designed to be played in real time. Relatively
early, however, people began to develop instruments that combined electronic sound
generators and sequencers. The first instrument of this kind was presented by the French
duo Edouard Coupleux and Joseph Givelet in 1929—the inspirationally named
Automatically Operating Musical Instrument of the Electric Oscillation Type. This hybrid
married electronic sound generation to a mechanically punched tape control. Generally
acknowledged to be a mouthful, its unofficial name was shortened to Coupleux-Givelet
Synthesizer by its builders; this was, incidentally, the first time a musical instrument was
called a “synthesizer.”
372 Appendix Synthesizer Basics