A Brief look at the History of Music Technology

…through the 20th c.

Burr and Burton Academy

The Hydraulis

• 2nd century, BC. The Hydraulis was invented by Ktesibios sometime in the second century B.C. Ktesibios, the son of a Greek barber, was fascinated by pneumatics and wrote an early treatise on the use of hydraulic systems for powering mechanical devices. His most famous invention, the Hydraulis, used water to regulate the air pressure inside an organ. A small cistern called the pnigeus was turned upside down and placed inside a barrel of water. A set of pumps forced air into the pnigeus, forming an air reservoir, and that air was channeled up into the organ's action.

Not electric but…

Telharmonium

• In 1897 Thaddeus Cahill patented (pat no 580,035) what was to become the "Telharmonium" or "Dynamophone" which can be considered the first significant electronic musical instrument . The first fully completed model was presented to the public in 1906 in Holyoke, Mass.

Theremin

• Invented in 1919 by Leon Theremin (1896-1993), this unique instrument is once again gaining popularity.

• The theremin is played by waving your hands near two metal antennas: one controlling pitch and the other volume. The antennas vary the frequency of two oscillators. To create the sound, a fixed oscillator is mixed with the variable pitch oscillator and their difference (or beat frequency) is amplified.

• When you play a theremin, you essentially become part of the instrument.

ELISHA GRAY

In these times, there was no telephone and telegraphs were clicking information all around the world. The main problem was that a telegraph line was able to transmit one message at once. Thus, the first interest of many telegraphists, like Elisha Gray, was to invent a new method to transmit multiple messages on a single line.

Elisha Gray worked on this topic when his nephew showed him a strange experiment. It consists in an electric oscillator, a bathroom and a hand. This experiment generates a sound : the electric oscillations are transformed into acoustic vibrations through the oscillation of the electrified hand ! Thus, Elisha was his own amplifier.

Soon Elisha Gray improved his invention and replaced the bathroom with the body of a violin and a metal plate. He stated that the new "instrument" sounded in between the violin and the "electric bathroom".

Since that time, Elisha Gray known how to generate and transmit sounds with electricity. Thus he asked himself : "can I transmit chords, i.e. many notes, or signals, on a single telegraph line..."

Elisha Gray and his electric bathroom (1874). Elisha Gray and his electric violin (1874).

• ELISHA GRAY

• To demonstrate his ability to transmit chords, Elisha Gray built a 8 oscillator bank that can be controlled with a piano keyboard.

• Rapidly, the rather technical demonstrations attracted people interested in music. Thus, Gray developed a two octave version of the "harmonic telegraph" and toured in the entire USA.

• The success of sound generation and transmission changed the interests of Gray : instead of developing multiplex techniques he became interested in sound and especially voice.

• Elisha Gray patented the telephone two hours after Alexander Graham Bell...

• The harmonic telegraph (1874)

• Elisha Gray on tour, a synth concert 100 years before Jean-Michel Jarre (1877)

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Musique Concrete

• Schaeffer chose to name his new art musique concrete to differentiate it from normal music, musique abstraite.

• Music concrete was recorded directly to tape with real (concrete) sounds , while musique abstraite was the traditional way of composing by writing down the score to be played later.

• Music Concrete was based on manipulation of tape. (Although the first research involved phonograph records, eventually tape technology became more available , and with it the possibilities of splicing and pasting parts together versus a non-re-recordable fixed format). It also concentrated on 'found sounds' or natural recordings rather than electronically produced sounds such as synthesizers.

• Pieces that would last only a few minutes could take months of recording, cutting and splicing to create. Here are some of the tape techniques used.

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CUTTING and SPLICING TAPE

Cutting the tape at different angles was used to create different attacks and decays.

Not only did musique concrete composers use the cuts shown above, but they would go so far as to take a long horizontal cut, cut it into smaller calculated sizes, and splice the cuts together vertically or at different angles!

A. soft attack or decay

B. combined attack and decay of two sounds

C. medium attack or decay

D. hard attack or abrupt finish

E. softer and less abrupt than D

Hammond B-3• The Hammond B-3

• There were many varieties of the Hammond organ, some designed for home use, some designed for church use, and some designed for live gigs and studio recording. But the most popular variety, and the one still commonly in use today (if you can find one that isn’t too beat up) is the Hammond B-3. This organ has two 61 note keyboards, (manuals), sometimes called the swell (top) and the great (bottom), a variety of built-in special effects, (including "percussion" effects, several different chorus and vibrato effects, and adjustable attack and decay effects), 9 preset keys for both manuals, (the inversely white and black keys on the bottom octave of each manual), two sets of nine stops (drawbars) for each manual, a full two octave set of foot pedals with two pedal drawbars built in to the console, a volume pedal (expression pedal) built into the base, a solid walnut body with 4 legs and base, a built-in stool, and it weighed in at over 400 pounds. Also, it needed to be run through a separate speaker called a Leslie (which I will explain later), which also came in many varieties and sizes, but which was usually around six feet tall and weighed almost as much as the organ. To get a B-3 to a gig, you would probably need a truck or a van to transport it, a dolly or three to four guys to carry it, and then a prayer that you didn’t have to carry it up too many flights of stairs. Why, you must be wondering, would any sane musician want to take this piece of furniture with them out to a gig? If you have ever heard a good B-3, you would understand. A Hammond B-3 can all at once sound like a carnival, a big band, a horn section, a small jazz combo, a funk group, a percussion section, a flute, and/or countless other things. How does one instrument manage to do all this? The answer begins in the drawbars.

RCA Mark 2• The RCA Mark II cost RCA $500,000 to build. It had

an additional twenty-four variable oscillators, and took up ten 19" racks. It used a multi-track tape machine to record completed tracks.

• Both machines used punched paper rolls to program the synthesizer/sequencer in binary code, with four columns of dots for each parameter, giving sixteen possibilities - the first column being worth 1, the next 2, the next 4, and the last 8. There were control sections for Frequency, Octave, Envelope, Timbre, and Volume. The paper roll was 38cm wide and moved at about 10cm/sec - making a maximum bpm of 240. Longer notes were composed of individual holes, but with a mechanism which made the note sustain through till the last hole. Attact times were variable from 1 ms to 2 sec, and decay times from 4 ms to 19 sec. On the Mark II, High and low pass filtering was available, along with noise, glissando, tremelo, and patchable resonance and attenuation sections, both giving millions of possible settings.

RCA Mark 2

• Charles Wuorinen used it to generate material for his Pulitzer Prize winning "Time's Enconium". Then, in 1959, the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center aquired the machine from RCA. At Columbia-Princeton, Milton Babbitt used it extensively. His tape and tape and instrument pieces were realized using the RCA Mark II, including his masterpiece 'Philomel', for synthesized sound and soprano.

MoogModular Synthesis

• When most people think of synthesizers they think of all-in-one instruments that are programmed by pushing buttons, turning knobs, or pushing sliders. However, that is not the way it all began. The first synthesizers were modular, in that they were a group of modules that each performed a separate function. For example, one module, called an oscillator, produced a waveform (sawtooth, sine, pulse, etc...) and another, the amplifier, modified the amplitude (volume) of the waveform. Each of these two modules had inputs for control voltage (CV). For the oscillator, the higher the control voltage, the higher the frequency of the wave. For the amplifier, the higher the control voltage, the larger the amplitude of the waveform was, and therefor the volume of the sound. These modules can be patched together in an almost infinite number of ways, making sound far more complex than today's synthesizers can even dream of making.

• Between the years 1967 and 1981, Moog Music was designing, improving upon, and selling modules for their modular synthesizers. Although each modular system was available custom configured, there were many stock design models of the Moog modular synthesizer. Models included: 3C, 2C, 1C, 3P, 2P, 1P, 10, 12, 15, 55, 35, and C.E.M.S. (Co-ordinated Electronic Music Studio).

Production period:3C/2C/1C: 1967-723P/2P/1P: 1970-72

10/12: 1971-73

15/25/55: 1972-81

Mini Moog • "Back in 1969 and '70, Moog Music was not yet in the musical instrument business per se. Our modular synthesizers were sold as pieces of professional audio equipment. They were made to order, and we considered them to be too complex and high-tech to survive on the floor of a musical instrument store. Our original concept for the Minimoog was to take some of the basic features of our modular instruments and integrate them into a compact performance synthesizer that could be programmed without patch cords. We imagined that Minimoog customers would consist primarily of studio musicians who wanted a cut-down version of a Moog modular system to take on their gigs.... We figured that we might sell as many as a hundred Minis before it would be time to update the design.

• "We had no idea of what a small portable synthesizer should look like, so we asked our industrial engineers for some suggestions. They came up with drawings for some very sleek packages indeed -- white sculptured plastic cabinets that suggested computer terminals, gleaming multi-colored panels, and strikingly-shaped controls. We then polled our musician friends to see which designs they liked. We were in for a surprise! Nearly everybody shot down the sculptured plastic in favor of natural wood and simple lines. We simplified one of our designer's concepts to the point where we could actually make the cabinets in our own modest wood shop, then proceeded to create the Minimoog.

Production period:1970-81

Polymoog

• Highly popular when it came out, the Polymoog is a preset, polyphonic synthesizer with a 71-note (E-D), touch-sensitive keyboard that is splittable three ways. It features divide-down oscillator circuitry and, therefore, didn't sound as rich as most people wanted a polyphonic analog synthesizer (especially a Moog) to sound. The presets are strings, piano, organ, harpsichord, funk, clav, vibes, and brass. The optional (and expensive) Polypedal board allows you to switch between single and multiple triggering, as well as control the pitch, filter, sustain, and external sync. In addition to a main volume slider, the Polymoog has volume sliders for each of the 3 keyboard sections. It also features a 3-band graphic EQ section, and an extensive filter modulation section, allowing it to be modulated by its own LFO, sample-and-hold, and envelope sliders, with variable keyboard tracking.

Production period:1975-80

Yamaha DX7

• Production period:1983-87

The real revolution in digital synthesis. The first reasonably priced digital synth on the market. Used FM algorithmic

digital synthesis as a means of sound production.