Synthesizer - History

History

The beginnings of the synthesizer are difficult to trace as there is often confusion between sound synthesizers and arbitrary electric/electronic musical instruments.

Early electric instruments

For example, one of the earliest electric musical instruments was invented in 1876 by American electrical engineer Elisha Gray, who accidentally discovered that he could control sound from a self-vibrating electromagnetic circuit. In doing so, he invented a basic single note oscillator. This musical telegraph used steel reeds, whose oscillations were created and transmitted over a telegraphy line by electromagnets. Gray also built a simple loudspeaker device into later models, consisting of a vibrating diaphragm in a magnetic field, to make the oscillator audible.
This instrument was a remote electromechanical musical instrument using telegraphy and electric buzzers. Though it had no sound synthesis function, some have erroneously called it the first synthesizer.

Early additive synthesizer – Tonewheel organs

In 1897, Thaddeus Cahill invented Teleharmonium (or Dynamophone) utilizing dynamo (early electric generator), and it had the capability of additive synthesis also seen on Hammond organ later invented in 1934. However, Cahill's business was not successful due to various reasons (ex. too huge scale of system, rapid evolutions of electronics, crosstalk issues on the telephone line, etc), and similar but more compact instruments were developed one after another.

Emergence of electronics – Theremin (1920), Ondes Martenot (1928), and Trautonium (1929)

In 1906, a huge revolution of electronics had begun.

American engineer Lee De Forest invented the world first amplifying vacuum tube, called the Audion tube. This led to new technologies, including radio and sound film for entertainment. These new technologies also influenced the music industry, and resulted in various early electronic musical instruments that used vacuum tubes, including:

• Audion piano by Lee De Forest in 1915
• Theremin by Léon Theremin in 1920
• Ondes Martenot by Maurice Martenot in 1928
• Trautonium by Friedrich Trautwein in 1929

etc. Most of these early instruments used "heterodyne circuit" to produce audio frequency, and these sound synthesis capabilities were initially limited, however, along with the development over a decade, these instruments finally won the enough expression ability.

Graphical sound

Also in 1920s, Arseny Avraamov developed various systems of graphic sonic art, and similar graphical sound systems were also developed around the world, one after another. In 1938, USSR engineer Yevgeny Murzin invented a design for a music-composition tool called ANS, one of the earliest conceptions of a real-time additive synthesizer using optoelectronics. Although his idea of reconstructing a sound from its visible image was apparently simple, it was only realized 20 years later, in 1958, because his professional field was not related to music.

Subtractive synthesis & polyphonic synthesizer

In the 1930s and 1940s, the basic elements required for the modern analog subtractive synthesizers — audio oscillators, audio filters, envelope controllers, and various effects units — had already appeared and were utilized on several electronic instruments. And even the earliest polyphonic synthesizers went into commercial production in Germany and the United States. The Warbo Formant Organ developed by Harald Bode in Germany in 1937, was a four-voice key-assignment keyboard with two formant filters and a dynamic envelope controller, it eventually went into commercial production by a factory in Dachau. The Hammond Novachord released in 1939, was an electronic keyboard that used a frequency-divider for sound generation, with vibratos, filter, resonator-network and a dynamic envelope controller. During the three years that Hammond manufactured this model they shipped 1,069 units, but discontinued production at the start of World War II. Both instruments were the forerunners of the following electronic organs and the later polyphonic synthesizers.

Monophonic electronic keyboards – Hammond Solovox (1940), Ondioline (1941), Clavioline (1947), Clavivox (1952)

Georges Jenny built his first ondioline in France in 1941.

Other innovations

In the late 1940s, Canadian inventor and composer, Hugh Le Caine invented Electronic Sackbut, which provided the earliest realtime control of three aspects of sound (volume, pitch and timbre), corresponding to today's touch-sensitive keyboard, pitch & modulation controllers, etc. The controllers were initially implemented as the multidimensional pressure keyboard in 1945, then changed to a group of dedicated controllers operated by left hand in 1948.

Also in Japan, as early as in 1935, Yamaha developed Magna organ, a multi-timbral keyboard instrument based on electrically-blown free reeds with pickups, and possibly similar to the electrostatic reed organs. However, in 1949, Japanese composer Minao Shibata discussed the concept of "a musical instrument with very high performance" that can "synthesize any kind of sound waves" and is "...operated very easily," predicting that with such an instrument, "...the music scene will be changed drastically."

Electronic music studios as "sound synthesizer"

After World War II, electronic music including electroacoustic music and musique concrète was created by contemporary composers, and numerous electronic music studios were established around the world, especially in Bonn, Cologne, Paris and Milan. These studios were typically filled with electronic equipment including oscillators, filters, tape recorders, audio consoles, etc., and the whole studio functioned as a "sound synthesizer".

Origin of the term "sound synthesizer"

In 1951–1952, RCA produced a machine called the Electronic Music Synthesizer; however, it was more accurately a composition machine, because it did not produce sounds in real time. Then, RCA developed the first programmable sound synthesizer, RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer, and installed it to Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1957. Prominent composers including Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, Milton Babbitt, Halim El-Dabh, Bülent Arel, Charles Wuorinen, and Mario Davidovsky used the RCA Synthesizer extensively in various compositions.