Instruments of the Proto Synthesis Era
Synthesizer | School | Why it belongs here | Familiarity |
|---|---|---|---|
(1897) | American | The first instrument to synthesize sound from electrically generated waveforms, and the first to distribute it over wires - additive synthesis and streaming audio, both invented before the vacuum tube. | chronicled |
(1920) | Soviet | The founding gesture of electronic performance: pitch and amplitude taken off the keyboard entirely and given to the hands in free space. | chronicled |
(1924-26) | German | Jörg Mager's monophonic tube instrument brought microtonality and continuous glide into concert practice, and seeded a whole family of German electronic keyboards. | chronicled |
Dynaphone (1927) | French | René Bertrand's instrument is the direct link between early electronics and the modernist avant-garde through his long collaboration with Varèse. | chronicled |
Ondes Martenot (1928) | French | The first early electronic instrument to earn a permanent orchestral repertoire, and the first with expressive ribbon and touch control that composers wrote for. | chronicled |
Coupleux Givelet Organ (1929) | French | An oscillator bank organ driven by punched paper tape, the earliest serious attempt at a programmed sequenced electronic instrument. | chronicled |
Trautonium (1930) | German | Subtractive filtering of a harmonically rich source plus a fingerboard controller, later carried into repertoire by Oskar Sala's Mixtur-Trautonium. | chronicled |
Rhythmicon (1930-31) | Soviet | Theremin's collaboration with Henry Cowell produced the first rhythm machine and the first instrument to treat polyrhythm itself as a synthesis parameter. | chronicled |
Variophone (1932) | Soviet | Sholpo's optical drawn-sound machine synthesized waveforms photographed onto film, a Soviet line of graphic synthesis with no Western equivalent. | chronicled |
Hammond Organ: from A to B-3 (1935, 1954) | American | Tonewheel additive synthesis with drawbars, mass produced and commercially viable. The first electronic instrument to become a normal object in the world. The tonewheel design of B-3 has reached its definitive point, with percussion added (the era's one instrument that became permanent). | chronicled |
Welte Lichttonorgel (1936) | German | Welte's photoelectric organ reads recorded waveforms from glass optical discs, arguably the first instrument to play back sampled sound. | chronicled |
Heliophon (1936) | German | Helberger's keyboard development of the Hellertion, with continuous pressure-sensitive control, one of the great instruments of the era destroyed by war. | chronicled |
Novachord (1939) | American | The world's first commercial polyphonic synthesizer: divide down oscillators, subtractive filtering, envelope shaping, 25 years before Moog. | chronicled |
Solovox (1940) | American | Hammond's monophonic keyboard attachment took electronic lead voicing into the domestic piano and normalized the idea of a synthesizer as an accessory. | chronicled |
Ondioline (1941) | French | Jenny's instrument combined a vibrating touch sensitive keyboard with filter based timbre presets, and its imitative voices anticipated the preset synth entirely. | chronicled |
Electronic Sackbut (1945-48) | American | Hugh Le Caine's instrument is now recognized as the first voltage controlled synthesizer, with left hand continuous timbre control that remains ahead of most modern designs. | chronicled |
Clavioline (1947) | French | The first electronic instrument to reach a genuine mass market, and the reason a synthesizer sound arrived in popular music before the synthesizer did. | chronicled |
Chamberlin (1949) | American | Harry Chamberlin's tape-replay keyboard is the first sampler, and the direct ancestor of the Mellotron. | chronicled |
WDR Studio für Elektronische Musik (1951) | German | Not an instrument but the first studio of its kind (the composition by assembly model that every modular studio afterwards inherited). | chronicled |
RCA Mark I (1955) | American | Olson and Belar's machine established the word "synthesizer" and the principle of complete parametric specification of a tone. | chronicled |
Ekvodin V-9 (1958) | Soviet | Volodin's mature model gave the USSR a serious expressive monophonic synthesizer with dynamic touch, developed on a line entirely independent of the West. | chronicled |
ANS Synthesizer (1937-58) | Soviet | Murzin's photoelectronic instrument realized graphic synthesis at full scale: draw the spectrum on glass, hear it (a 20 year private project against the state's indifference). | chronicled |
RCA Mark II (1957) | American | The first programmable electronic music synthesizer, and the machine that made the Columbia Princeton studio the center of American electronic composition. | chronicled |