Origins: Late 19th Century To Early 20th Century
The ability to record sounds is often connected to the production of electronic music, but not absolutely necessary for it. The earliest known sound recording device was the phonautograph, patented in 1857 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. It could record sounds visually, but was not meant to play them back.
In 1878, Thomas A. Edison patented the phonograph, which used cylinders similar to Scott's device. Although cylinders continued in use for some time, Emile Berliner developed the disc phonograph in 1887. Lee De Forest's 1906 invention, the triode audion tube, later had a profound affect on electronic music. It was the first thermionic valve, or vacuum tube, and led to circuits that could create and amplify audio signals, broadcast radio waves, compute values, and perform many other functions.
Before electronic music, there was a growing desire for composers to use emerging technologies for musical purposes. Several instruments were created that employed electromechanical designs and they paved the way for the later emergence of electronic instruments. An electromechanical instrument called the Telharmonium (sometimes Teleharmonium or Dynamophone) was developed by Thaddeus Cahill in the years 1898–1912. However, simple inconvenience hindered the adoption of the Telharmonium, due to its immense size. One early electronic instrument often mentioned may be the Theremin, invented by Professor Léon Theremin circa 1919–1920. Other early electronic instruments include the Audion Piano invented in 1915 by Lee De Forest who was inventor of triode audion as mentioned above, the Croix Sonore, invented in 1926 by Nikolai Obukhov, and the Ondes Martenot, which was most famously used in the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen as well as other works by him. The Ondes Martenot was also used by other, primarily French, composers such as Andre Jolivet.
Read more about this topic: Electronic Music
Famous quotes containing the words late, century and/or early:
“It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt to themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A friend to all is a friend to none.”
—18th century English proverb, collected in Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia (1732)
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)