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Edgar Varèse
Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse was a French composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States. Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm; he coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic. -
The Telharmonium
Cahill first patented his telharmonium in 1897. In his patent, he described it as a large system capable of electrically generating, controlling and shaping sounds. The telharmonium was a direct precursor to the modern synthesizer. The telharmonium keyboard was touch-sensitive, just like a piano and the console allowed the sounds to be mixed and filtered to emulate various brass, woodwind, and string instruments heard in orchestras. -
The Mighty Wurlitzer
The theatre organ had to accompany the silent film, providing appropriate sound effects as well as background music. It had to permit stylish performance of the popular music of the day. In other words, it had to successfully imitate the dance band. It also had to perform the more traditional role of the organ at that time, namely the accompaniment of group singing and the performance of orchestral transcriptions. -
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John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. -
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Les Paul
Lester William Polsfuss, known as Les Paul, was an American jazz, country, and blues guitarist, songwriter, luthier, and inventor. He was one of the pioneers of the solid-body electric guitar, and his prototype, called the Log, served as inspiration for the Gibson Les Paul. Paul taught himself how to play guitar, and while he is mainly known for jazz and popular music, he had an early career in country music. -
The Theremin
Russian scientist, Leon Theremin (born Lev Sergeyevich Termen) invented the Etherophone, which was later simply called the Theremin. The Theremin was quite a unique instrument because you never actually touched the instrument to play it. It lacked the traditional keyboard, fret, or finger holes found in other instruments. The pitch (highness or lowness of sound) was controlled by moving the hand back and forth in relation to the pitch antenna. -
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Louis and Bebe Barron
Married in 1947, the Barrons received a tape recorder as a wedding gift. They used it to record friends and parties, and later opened one of the first private sound studios in America. The 1948 book Cybernetics by MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, inspired Louis Barron to build electronic circuits, which he manipulated to generate sounds. Bebe's job was to sort through hours and hours of tape. Together they manipulated the sounds to create an otherworldly auditory experience. -
The Ondes Martenot
Maurice Martenot wanted to invent an electronic instrument that would be more widely accepted as a traditional instrument. Even though the Ondes Martenot used technology similar to the Theremin, it looked much different than the Theremin. The Ondes was housed in a small wooden cabinet and had a keyboard, just like a small piano. -
Hammond Organ
An American inventor named Laurens Hammond developed a new electronic instrument using the same tone-wheel process that was used in the Telharmonium. The use of vacuum tubes allowed the instrument to be much smaller and more practical than the bulky Telharmonium. In fact, the Hammond organ was not much larger than an upright piano. It was built to mimic the sound of the pipe organ, but was rejected by pipe organ enthusiasts as they complained that it was too electronic. -
Turntablism
Turntablism is defined as the art of manipulating sounds and creating music using phonograph or digital turntables. Who would have ever imagined a turntable would be classified as an instrument! The concept of turntablsim has roots that date back to the early period of musique concrète with composers such as Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, and Paul Hindemith. -
First computer music preformed
The earliest recording of music that was performed by a computer was recorded in England in 1951 as the Ferranti Mark1 computer played the songs God Save the Queen, Baa Baa Black Sheep and In the Mood. It certainly was very primitive sounding compared to today’s computer generated music. -
RCA Mark II
Designed by Herbert Belar and Harry Olson in 1958, the RCA Mark II was the flagship piece of equipment at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. RCA synthesizer was not very practical (weighing about 3 tons and 20 feet wide) and required considerable programming, but it did provide a new way for composers to create music electronically without having to splice together individual sounds recorded on magnetic tape. -
Buchla Synthesizer
While Robert Moog was on the east coast designing his Moog synthesizer, Morton Subotnick and Ramón Sender of the San Francisco Tape Music Center had hired engineer Donald Buchla to design a synthesizer for their west coast studio. Like the Moog, it too was complicated to use with its many patch cords. Unlike the Moog, however, it did not use a traditional keyboard. Buchla did not like the limitations of the traditional 12-note keyboard that was used on the Moog. -
Moog Synthesizer
Robert Moog introduced the first commercially available modern synthesizer. Although much easier to use than the RCA Mark II, it still had its complexities. It required some basic knowledge of wave physics and composers were faced with the daunting task of patch cord connections, control panel settings, and rigorous procedures to create a set of sounds. -
Laptop Orchestras
The first laptop orchestra was founded by Dan Trueman and Perry Cook in 2005 at Princeton University. Since it’s founding, many other laptop orchestras have developed at other universities and cities around the country. The two most notable laptop orchestras in the United States are the PLOrk (Princeton Laptop Orchestra) and the SLOrk (Stanford Laptop Orchestra).