Audio technology is something we take for granted in today's world. Not many people really truly know how their favorite song is made. That raises a lot of
questions like... What is sample rate? How do tape cassettes create audio? how does a CD player play perfectly even if it has quite a few scratches? What is Pulse Code Modulation, or PCM for short, and how does it make music? There are a whole lot of questions to be answered, so lets jump right in.
It's the mid 1840s and the world is demanding a more efficient communication system because of the growing distance between the United States. While everyone was waiting for the post office to deliver their mail, the US government was investing into two men, Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail. Their idea to use electrical wires and a quirky little push button to create audible dots and dashes that carried a coded message. This new system became known as the telegraph and it deployed its use of the
Morse Code alphabet.
What Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail did not know is that in the process of creating a new messaging system, they technically created the world's first audio synthesizer.
The idea of Audio Synthesis has been around forever. Things like pipe organs could replicate the tones of trumpets with just a difference in air pressure through a series of pipes. The problem with pipe organs was that it could not be moved places very easily. It was large and usually highly specialized and expensive. Usually, the only musicians who used these massive contraptions were people who worked in the massive cathedrals to play the hymns during the weekly masses. Because of the large and specialized task people tried to create instruments that could be moved around more easily, but the technology wasn't there yet, so they just didn't care for quite a few decades.
Fast forward a few decades and we find ourselves in the Gilded Age. New ideas of transmitting information wirelessly started to be coined by many inventors, especially Nikola Tesla. But in 1901, Tesla's idea was already being successfully incarnated by inventor, Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi created the Long Distance Radio Telegraph system and it became an immediate success in the communications world. In fact, it was used to transmit the distress signal on board the RMS Titanic in April of 1912. Not long after, things like microphones could be connected to radios and operators could transmit their voices like the Bell Telephone could over wire. But in 1919, a strange new musical instrument was created on accident.
Leon Theremin was a young Russian physicist trying to create a device that could read and display gas pressure electronically. That's when the breakthrough happened. Theremin noticed something strange every time he moved his hand closer to one of the sensor rods, the device would make eerie sounds. Soon after that, a crowd of people would watch him play his instrument, astonished by his ability to make melodies. This was truly the first audio synthesizer to used to create music. The theremin has been used in multiple 50s sci-fi movies to stir an eerie feeling in the audience.
The 1930s, most well known for its financial troubles and the Dustbowl, didn't really have an effect on innovation in electronically created music. new radio technology and types of components were still being created. A new keyboard, known as the Hammond Novachord. This instrument created by the Hammond organ company is widely considered the first true polyphonic synthesizer using 72 voices to create a warm, rich tone.
In the next part, we will get into how the Novachord worked and how it created tones using vacuum tubes. We will also learn how polyphony works and why it is useful when making music.
Thanks, as always!
AJ