10.6

725Logic Pro Instruments
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. R. A. Moog, whose synthesizers would later garner worldwide fame,
began to build Theremins at the age of 19.
In Europe, 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 either 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 that responded not only to key velocity and aftertouch 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—named the Automatically
Operating Musical Instrument of the Electric Oscillation Type—was presented by the French
duo Edouard Coupleux and Joseph Givelet in 1929. This hybrid married electronic sound
generation to a mechanically punched tape control. Its name was unofficially shortened to
Coupleux-Givelet Synthesizer by its builders, the first time a musical instrument was called
a “synthesizer.”
The term was formally introduced in 1956 with the debut of the RCA Electronic Music
Synthesizer Mark I, developed by American engineers Harry F. Olson and Herbert Belar. Its
dual-voice sound generation system consisted of 12tuning forks, which were stimulated
electromagnetically. For its time, the instrument offered relatively sophisticated signal-
processing options. The output signal of the sound generator could be monitored by
loudspeakers and, amazingly, recorded directly onto two records. A single motor powered
both turntables and the control unit of the Mark 1. The synthesizer was controlled by
information punched onto a roll of paper tape, enabling continuous automation of pitch,
volume, timbre, and envelopes. It was extremely complicated to use, it was unreliable, and
spontaneous playing was impossible.