Exploring The History Of Electronic Music Online

We're going to use the Net Notes column this month to talk about some of the web sites that let you delve into the history of mechanical and electronic instruments. Without certain pioneers of the past, today's amazing hi-tech synths and other gear just wouldn't be here - so shouldn't we, as musicians who take advantage of modern technology, become more aware of the giants' shoulders on which we all stand? Not that finding out about electronic instrument history is such a chore: it's gripping stuff on the whole, sometimes amusing, and the web is the perfect place to do your research.

Incidentally, for a quick, bare-bones, but very friendly and usable electronic music overview, surf on over to www.indiana.edu/~emusic/. This overview takes the form of a simple time-line going from 1902 to the present day. As well as offering a suggested listening and reading list, it provides lots of clues about what to search for in your quest for knowledge.

One of the most fascinating early electric instruments was Thaddeus Cahill's Telharmonium - perhaps even more so because it was quite successful in its time and yet is hardly known outside specialised circles today. The Telharmonium seems especially significant as the Internet becomes increasingly widely used for music broadcasting, because it too used telephone lines to disseminate music. The Gyrofrog site (www.io.com/~jcastle/music.html) tells the fascinating story of how Cahill patented his invention in 1896, describing it as a "large system capable of electrically generating, controlling, and shaping sounds, which could be reproduced through a loudspeaker system" (and later down phone lines). Apparently, Cahill even used the word 'synthesizing' in his patent description of the Telharmonium.

This thing was huge. Its sounds were generated by alternators called rheotomes, which themselves were almost the size of a person. A Telharmonium system was actually installed in New York in the early 1900s, requiring an entire floor of a large building to itself. It reportedly cost $200,000 to build, and Cahill planned to link it by phone to houses, offices and places of entertainment, where subscribers would receive the music he transmitted - including planned live Telharmonium concerts. The plans never came to as much as Cahill had hoped, but the Telharmonium scored a number of firsts, including the development of a sound-producing technique which was used much later on in Hammond organs. It has even been said that the instrument triggered the birth of electronic music.

You can read about the merits of this claim over at obsolete.com (www.obsolete.com/120_years/), where you'll find an arguably even better history of the Telharmonium. That's not all you'll find, as this is a fantastic site; the subtitle, '120 Years Of Electronic Music', gives you a pretty good idea of what you can expect. Obsolete.com "charts the development of electronic musical instruments from 1870 to 1990", in satisfying detail, with what appear to be rare pictures accompanying many of the entries. The site even features downoadable sound files for some of the instruments it covers.

Obsolete.com is one of the few web sites to offer background on Bell Labs research physicist Homer Dudley's 1939/1940 Vocoder (now fashionable once again) and Voder. The latter was designed to produce synthetic speech electronically, which it did surprisingly well. Intrigued by obsolete.com's Voder sound file, we went on a hunt for more Voder stuff and hit the mother lode for audio files at home8.swipnet.se/~w-88660/samples.htm. Check this one out for clues to a fascinating in-joke from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Another very significant early instrument is the Ondes Martenot (which translates as 'Martenot's waves'), which is related to the much better-known Theremin in the way it produces sound. If 'Theremin' means nothing to you, then you haven't been reading your SOS faithfully and clearly need to pay a visit to www.Nashville.Net/~theremin/, one of the best Theremin pages, with lots of links.

Invented around the end of World War I by Maurice Martenot, a wireless station sergeant who had noticed that sound vibrations were produced by the recently invented radio tubes, the Ondes Martenot was first unveiled in public at the Paris Opera in 1928. Martenot intended the glassy-sounding instrument to be a part of the conventional orchestra - he even built a microtonal model, to be used for Hindi music, in 1938 - and many works have been specially written for it by leading composers such as Messiaen, Varese and Boulez. Someone, somewhere, is making Martenots even now, we believe.

Read the full story of the Martenot at obsolete.com, as above, but also checkout the Ondes Martenot Home Page (shift.merriweb.com.au/ondes/). Here you can find a full list of the classical repertoire of the Martenot, and also discover where to get official tuition in Martenot playing technique, if you really must! More Martenot stuff, including good pictures, is available at www.chez.com/cslevine/Ondes/WAVES.html, and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, www.ieee.org) web site also has a brief overview of how it works. You'll usually find that checking out several pages for a given instrument provides the best picture, as often one site has information that another doesn't.

For a fascinating Internet experience that could end up costing you a lot in telephone charges, check out science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project (www.islandnet.com/~ianc/dm/dm.html). Sterling, who co-wrote The Difference Engine with William Gibson, has teamed up with an equally obsessive colleague to create a central database of what they call dead media - anything that communicates information of any kind and is now obsolete. Naturally, music technologies are up there with all the other dead media, and it's a good place to look for interesting early instruments. The site reproduces part of an impressive list of instruments compiled by electronic artist and educator Victoria Vesna, and that's well worth a look. Also, take a trip back to the 17th century as you read about the Cat Piano and the Tiger Organ. We're not going to spoil your fun by revealing what they are, and OK, they're not electronic, but they could certainly be described as instruments!

The Dead Media Project features a page on the Organette, a late-19th-century mechanical music curio that was immensely popular. Similar in concept to the player piano, the Organette had many variants, but all apparently used bellows and reeds to generate sound and punched-paper music to select the notes to be played. There seems to be a thriving antique organette collector scene (check out the Schmidt's Piano Rolls site at www.actionwebcreations.com/smr), and it's possible to buy new parts and rolls for them. It's even feasible (as the devices and their music are so simple) to gouge your own tunes into suitable paper and have an organette play whatever you want it to - low-tech music!

Most electronic musicians think of sequencing, the mainstay of so much modern music, as a relatively recent invention but, as shown by the above at least, the idea has actually been around for a very long time. What's a player-piano if not a device for sequencing notes without having a person to play them? And, of course, the paper rolls punched with slots to make the piano play the desired notes are the inspiration for the piano-roll MIDI note displays used by almost all computer sequencers these days.

While we're on the subject of personalities who were somewhat ahead of their time, we should introduce Hugh Le Caine, a Canadian electronic composer and pioneer from the era when, if you wanted electronic music gear, you built it. The inventor of the charmingly named Electronic Sackbut (the sackbut being a medieval precursor of the trombone), Le Caine has been called "one of the heroes of electronic music." He began his career as a scientist working on early RADAR systems and atomic physics, but fascination with sound generation led him to set up a personal studio in 1945 and start to work on electronic musical instruments. The Electronic Sackbut bore no resemblance at all to its ancient namesake, being a monophonic keyboard instrument "now recognised as the first voltage-controlled synthesizer." His work with voltage control continued, and he eventually separated the Sackbut's different parts into discrete units - 'modules' - so that they could be used for different tasks. Sound familiar? Some of the features he considered essential to an electronic instrument and incorporated into his own designs, including touch-sensitivity, didn't even become part of commercial instruments until relatively recently. Canadian music magazine Musicworks gives Le Caine some good space at musicworks-mag.com/le_caine/english/. You'll find more background like the above, pictures, CD liner notes, information on Gayle Young's excellent Le Caine print biography The Sackbut Blues, and audio samples.

Already Net Notes is over for another month, and we've barely scratched the surface of the rich history of electronic instruments and music. There are many more sites, with info on a staggering number of extinct but seminal musical devices to discover, especially as one comes further up to date. Enjoy.

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