Electronic Instruments for Musical Expression | Part 3 | 1950 onwards

Introduction

After long wars, there was still geo-political tension among numerous countries. A lot of countries in Asia and Africa were decolonized around this time period. The decade was called the atomic age, with significant advances in nuclear weapons and the beginning of the Space Race, notably with the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union in 1957. There was a drastic shift in how people consumed music, with radio, vinyl records, and emerging television as primary outlets. The recording industry transitioned from direct-to-disc recording to magnetic tape, enabling easier editing, overdubbing, and higher sound quality. The magnetic tape was such a powerful tool for music recording as it acted like an instrument that the composer, engineer, performer and musician interacted with. It was particularly interesting because in theory, now we only needed scissors and tapes to make loops, change playback time, cut and paste phrases and make loops. Of course the possibilities are endless and this is very similar to the fundamental idea of DAWs like ProTools and Ableton Live. Here one can record and manipulate the recording.

Image Courtesy Geeta Dayal¹

Claviox (1950) by Ramond Scott

Beginning in the 1940s, Ramond Scott’s music made for eccentric and brilliant scores for cartoons such as Warner Bros’  ‘Looney Tunes’ and ‘Merrie Melodies’. Scot founded Manhattan Research inc.m a commercial electronic music studio. The studio had many unique sound processors and generators including ‘infinitely variable envelope’, ‘infinitely variable ring modulators’, ‘chromatic electronic drum generator’ and ‘ variable wave shape generator’. The Claviox was a vacuum tube oscillator instrument which simulated Thermin’s gliding pitch but was played by a keyboard. The subassembly circuit was designed by the young Bob Moog.

“A lot of the sound producing circuitry of the Clavivox resembles very closely the first analog synthesizer my company made in the 1960s. Some of the sounds are not the same that you can get in analog synthesizers but they are close.” said Moog.  The machine was fitted with three ‘key’ controls on the left of the keyboard that controlled the attack of the note or cut off the note completely; these keys could be played with the left hand to give the envelope characteristic.

Image Courtesy Wikipedia - Victor²

The Radio Corporation of America(RCA) Synthesiser(1951) by Herrt Olsen and Hebert Belar employed at RCA’s Princeton Laboratories made The RCA as a way of electronically generating pop music. The publication for “A Mathematical Theory of Music” (1949) inspired Belar and Olsen to create the machine based on a system of random probability. The theory being that random variations of already created popular songs could be used to make new marketable songs. This led them to make the RCA Mk1 and Mk2 which could not remake a version of existing mu. It utilized a player-piano-style paper tape reader to encode pitch, duration, timbre, envelope, and volume parameters in binary for playback. There were four-note polyphony, up to 24 vacuum-tube oscillators, twelve fixed-pitch oscillators, and a white-noise source. It also produced sine, sawtooth, and triangle waveforms, plus noise—creating complex timbres along with glessando. It even had a high pass and low pass filter, resonance section and frequency shifter.

Music 1 - V (1957) by Max Mathews 

It was quickly replaced by Music 2 running on an IBM 704 was the first computer synthesis programme. Music III was written in 1959 for the new generation of IBM transistorised 7094 machines which were much faster. Max Mathews addressed two fundamental issues: first, the great amount of data needed to specify a sound function; and second, the need for a simple, powerful language to specify complex sequences of sound. The way he tried to give a solution to these problems was to store functions to speed up computations, to use unit generator building blocks to provide flexibility, and to define the concept of note for describing sound sequences. Unit Generators are the fundamental building blocks in computer music languages for creating and processing audio and control signals. They act as modules that either generate a new signal or modify an existing one. Block diagram is a way of representing sound in a modular/object oriented way. These Unit Generators can be drawn to represent sound in the form of a block diagram. These blocks are connected using wires to depict signal flow. These block diagrams became the foundation for tools like Max/MSP and Pure Data.

RCA Synthesizer influenced a lot of sound systems of the time like Oramics by Daphne Oram, an electronic music composer. It consisted of drawing onto a set of sprocketed synchronised strips of 35 mm covered in a series of photo-electric cells that in turn generated an electrical charge to control the sound frequency, timbre, amplitude and duration.

Image Courtesy 120 Year of electronic music

GROOVE System (1967) by Max Mathews and F. Richard Moore (USA)

Generated Real-time output operations on Voltage Controlled Equipment (GROOVE), utilising a Honeywell wellDDP-224 computer with a simple cathode ray tube display and disk and tape  for storage. “The computer should retain a score and the performer should influence the way in which the score is waving a stick but this is a minor detail…. The programme is basically a system for creating, storing , retrieving and editing functions of time. It allows the composition of time function  by turning knobs and pressing keys in real time: it stores the function on the disk file, it retrieves the stored function(the score_, combines them with the input function ( the conductor) in order to generate control functions which drive the analogue synthesiser and it provides for facile editing of functions via control of the programme time.” said Mathews.

The father of Computer Music( Max Mathews ) predicted in the 60s that, “By 2010, almost all music will be made electronically by digital circuits.” In 2025, most of the recorded music is either composed on, recorded on, mixed or mastered or distributed using digital circuits like the computer. 

Image Courtesy Wikipedia - Wurlitzer Sideman⁴

The Side Man ( 1959 ) by Wurlitzer

It was the first commercial electronic drum machine, designed. The Sideman was intended as a percussive accompaniment for the Wurlizers organ range. The sound source was a series of vacuum tubes which generated 10 presets of electronic drum sounds.The drum sounds swerve ‘sequenced’ by a set of rotating discs with metal contacts on the edge spaced in a certain pattern to generate parts of a particular rhythm.

Image Courtesy Adafruit⁵

Graphic 1 (1965 - 1969 ) by William H. Ninke, along with Carl Christensen and Henry S. McDonals

An early hybrid hardware–software graphic input system developed at Bell Labs around 1965, used with an IBM 704B computer. Its purpose was to allow composers to draw musical data directly onto a CRT screen rather than manually entering numeric parameters—a revolutionary leap in user interaction.

Graphic 1 supported real-time interactions: users could modify, erase, duplicate, and store the drawn musical shapes of computer-generated sound. Graphic 1 served as a fundamental prototype that foreshadowed the visual and interactive environments of modern Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs).

Image Courtesy Bell Labs⁶

Image Courtesy Moogesium⁷

Moog Synthesizers (1964) by Robert Moog

Robert Moog developed his ideas for an electronic instrument by starting out in 1961 building and selling Theremin kits and absorbing ideas about transistorized modular synthesis from the German designer Harald Bolde. Transistors were not bulky, power hungry and fragile like the vacuum tube. This led to low-cost and high quality synthesizers in the 1960s. With these, he created the voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), which generated a waveform whose pitch could be adjusted by changing the voltage. Moog designed his synthesizer around a standard of one volt per octave, and used voltage to control loudness with voltage-controlled amplifiers (VCAs).

Moog sold around 100 Theremin kits from 1961-63. After toying around with portable guitar amplifiers Moog was introduced to the idea of building new circuits that would be capable of producing sound and went on to make  synthesizers in collaboration with Herbert A. Deutsch and Wendy Carlos. Moog refined the synthesizer in response to requests from musicians and composers. 

In 1968, Wendy Carlos released Switched-On Bach, an album of Bach compositions arranged for Moog synthesizer. It won three Grammy Awards and was the first classical album certified platinum. Although this led to commercial success for Moog Synthesizers. Carlos, who had been assigned the male sex at birth, had transitioned to female by the time Switched-On Bach reached the zenith of its popularity. Carlos remained in hiding for nearly a decade out of fear for her personal safety and professional reputation. At the same time, her gender—not her music—became a focal point for many scholars and journalists. 

An early use of the Moog synthesizer in rock music came with the 1967 song by the Doors "Strange Days". In the same year, the Monkees used a Moog on their album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. In 1969, George Harrison released an album of Moog recordings, Electronic Sound, and the Beatles used the Moog on several tracks on their album Abbey Road.

Image Courtesy The New York Times⁸

Buchla

During his postgraduate studies at the University of Berkeley, Don Buchla worked on NASA projects, including the controls for the Gemini space capsule. After that, under the name “ San Francisco Tape Music Center”, Buchla started building his first Modular Synthesizer in  1963. This is around the same time Moog was building synthesizers on the “East Coast”. While Moog’s synthesizers accommodate keyboards, on the “West Coast” Buchla said, “They [the ports] were all capacitance-sensitive touch-plates, or resistance-sensitive in some cases, organized in various sorts of arrays…I saw no reason to borrow from a keyboard, which is a device invented to throw hammers at strings, later on, for operating switches for electronic organs and so-on. A keyboard is dictatorial.”

The manual control of the instrument reflected the concerns of the time around microtonality and the limitations of the tempered scale keyboard; Buchla, very much in the ‘serious’ experimental music camp designed the instrument to be set up and run to produce a continuous piece; more of an electronic music studio than an instrument per-se. The composer could trigger and manipulate multiple parameters using an array of pressure sensitive touch pads or ‘Kinaesthetic input ports’ to free themselves from the constraints of a standard keyboard:

Roland Synthesizer

The Roland corporation was established in Japan in 1972. The SH1000 was a portable and affordable analogue synthesiser. Roland continued to produce innovative instruments, in 1977 with their GR500 series analogue guitar synthesizer and the first commercial rhythm machine, the “Compurhythm” C79. In early 80s Roland released a range of inexpensive synthesisers, sequencers and drum machines like the SH101 monsynth, TB-303, TR-808 which were compact and widely used. 

Yamaha

The Japanese company that made bikes, furniture, pianos and guitars entered the synthesizer market with the GX-1 in 1975.It was their first polyphonic instrument priced at Eu 30,00. The Yamaha CS80 was more affordable competing with other polyphonic synthesizers like Moog Polymoog and ARP Omni. The CX5 Music ComputerThe CX5music computer was an FM multi-timbral digital synthesiser controlled by a QWERTY keyboard and Visual Display Unit.

The DX7 (1983) was the first truly digital synthesizer and was released with great commercial success in 1983 selling over 180,000 units. It used Frequency Modulation Synthesis developed by John Chowning at Stanford. FM synthesis in the Yamaha DX7 works by using digital frequency modulation of sine waves to create complex, harmonically rich sounds. Some of these operators act as carriers, producing sound directly, while others act as modulators, changing the frequency (phase) of the carriers in real-time. By modulating the frequency of a carrier wave with another wave, the DX7 generates intricate waveforms with a wide range of timbres, from bell-like tones to punchy basses. The DX7 was one of the first synths with a full complement of MIDI ports. It was instrumental in standardizing MIDI as well.

Source unknown⁹

Fairlight CMI:

The Fairlight CMI was the first commercially available digital sampling instrument, instead of generating sounds from mathematical wave data it used to digitize analog sounds via ADC for re-synthesis or processing.The Fairlight was equipped with two 6 octave keyboards an alphanumeric keyboard and an interactive VDU where sounds could be edited or drawn on the screen using a light pen. The whole instrument was controlled by proprietary software allowing editing looping mixing of sounds as well as the ability to draw sound waves and sequence samples. It also had digital sequences to play drums and other sounds.

Conclusion

Now finally, Electronic music interfaces were being used widely across continents and they were not the builder’s personal niche commodity but were available to buy and more affordable than ever.  Out of this emerged several musical movements all over the world giving birth to electronic, House, Jungle to name a few. Electronic music questioned norms of conventional music making and the society at large. Affordable and portable cassette players—especially boomboxes and the Sony Walkman—led to a boom in personal music consumption in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1980s Sony introduced the Compact Discs. The Compact Disc (CD) was co-developed by Philips and Sony and launched commercially in 1982 as a digital audio storage format. Computers became more accessible than ever in the 1980s and strong DSP tools like Max MSP were built along with early DAWs like Digidesign Sound Tools ( now called ProTools ).

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2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_Mark_II_Sound_Synthesizer

3. GROOVE Systems – Max Mathews (USA, 1970). 120 Years of Electronic Music. https://120years.net/groove-systems-max-mathews-usa-1970/

4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Wurlitzer Sideman (1959) disc sequencer [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wurlitzer_Sideman_(1959)_disc_sequencer.jpg

5. Adafruit Blog. (2024, December 11). The GRAPHIC 1 computer system at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1968. https://blog.adafruit.com/2024/12/11/the-graphic-1-computer-system-at-bell-telephone-laboratories-in-1968/

6. Bell System Memorial. (n.d.). Bell Labs and the invention of the transistor. https://memorial.bellsystem.com/belllabs_transistor.html

7. Moogseum. (n.d.). Bob Moog: An Inspired Life in Sound. Google Arts & Culture.

   https://artsandculture.google.com/story/bob-moog-an-inspired-life-in-sound-moogseum/1wXBjHt_6YypuA?hl=en

8. Pareles, J. (2016, September 17). Don Buchla, musical instrument inventor, dies at 79. The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/arts/music/don-buchla-dead.html

9. Image sourced via Google Images search. Original source unavailable. https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTPdW0drw3wov3Cc2TANjowNL7hFMYYumC0hw&s