The Science of Music by Andrew May

Author:Andrew May
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2023-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

An illustration of Maelzel’s panharmonicon, a kind of self-contained mechanical orchestra.

Unknown author, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

As for ‘electric instruments’, the first viable one dates from 1759. I’ll pause a second to let that sink in: not 1959, or even 1859, but 1759 – the year George Frederick Handel died. It was called the clavecin électrique, and it used a standard musical keyboard to operate a series of tuned bells by altering their static electric charge. The first ‘sound synthesiser’ followed around a century later – not as a musical instrument, but a scientific one. Designed by the physicist Hermann Helmholtz, it used electromagnets to vibrate an array of tuning forks of different sizes. Because the sound produced by a tuning fork is close to a pure sine wave, Helmholtz was able to use his device to recreate more complex sounds made up of a number of partials. This reverses the process of Fourier analysis described in Chapter 2, and – as we’ll see shortly – is an example of what in today’s jargon is called ‘additive synthesis’.

Actually, I was playing with words a little in the previous paragraph. There’s a difference between the adjective ‘electric’, which simply means powered by electricity, and ‘electronic’, which relates to electrons – subatomic particles that weren’t even discovered until the final years of the 19th century. While the clavecin électrique and the Helmholtz synthesiser are electric, they’re not electronic – and it’s only with electronics that really sophisticated technology becomes possible. It’s worth taking a step back at this point to see just why that’s the case.

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