THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC
Where do you begin a history of electronic music and the synthesiser? The popular and somewhat easy view is that the two are entwined, that electronic music started with the invention of the synthesiser and its use in the 60s and 70s. And indeed, that’s why we’ve chosen 1962 – 60 years ago – as the year from which things kicked off. But actually the synthetic manipulation of sound, and the machines that did it can be traced back further. Much further. In fact, both experimentation with sound and some weird and wonderful sonic manipulators go back hundreds of years. OK, the fun really started when people started recording and releasing the results a few decades back – not to mention making accurate records of the machines that they created – but before we get to the 60s, there’s a couple of hundred years to cover (albeit briefly), including some claims to discuss, some to dismiss and some others that are just, well, shocking… in all the wrong ways.
The start?
Taking things way back, you can make the case that the beautiful-sounding Golden Dionysis was very possibly the first electrical musical instrument. It was ‘built’ by the Czech electrical researcher Václav Prokop Diviš in 1748, who claimed to be able to recreate string and wind sounds with it. You’ll note that we say ‘claimed’ and ‘very possibly’, so, like we say, it might be better to move to firmer historic ground, over a century later when, at the very least, some of the claims were justified and recorded. (We’ll also note that other accounts of the time state that the instrument gave its users electric shocks… so we’re not exactly talking plug ‘n’ play!)
For this, we travel forward to the end of the late 19th century and Matthaüs Hipp’s Electromechanic Piano, which triggered sound by way of activating electric magnets with a keyboard. Even better records exist about the Telharmonium, developed at the same time by Thaddeus Cahill, an instrument not only capable of altering or indeed synthesising sound, but spreading it across the newly created phone network. (This instrument can therefore not only claim to be the first synth but also the first to use an
