"An early electromechanical instrument was the Telharmonium or Teleharmonium (also known as the Dynamophone), developed by Thaddeus Cahill in 1897. The Telharmonium was intended to be listened to using telephone receivers.Like the later Hammond organ, the Telharmonium used tonewheels to generate musical sounds as electrical signals by additive synthesis. An authoritative history of the Telharmonium is 'Magical Music from the Telharmonium' by Reynold Weidenaar, Scarecrow Press, 1995."
Title link takes you to more info on wikipedia. I ran into the image here and realized I hadn't put a post up on the teleharmonium yet..
I had this image in my mind:
ReplyDeleteThousands of people, without skin (sort of gooey), leaning by old telephones in their kitchens and halls, sitting on stools, all sticky like, listening to the Teleharmonium over those old bake-a-lite handsets.
Lots of wire with meat dangling at the ends.
Just like the internet today!
Very strange instrument, the telharmonium. Of course, we know it better today as the Hammond organ (same operating principles...electromagnetic tonewheels), but the Hammond never had some of the weirdness of its direct predecessor, such as the 36-note octave keyboards, the lack of proper amplification, the network-jamming crosstalk it caused on the NYC phone system, and so on. Sadly, it never was recorded, as far as anyone knows, and wound up being sold for scrap. Definitely the first 'synthesizer', though, as it used additive tone mixture methods not unlike the Hammond's drawbar system for timbre, and its envelopes depended on transformer hysteresis to 'ring' on release when the system was operating properly.
ReplyDeleteThankfully, anyone wanting an approximation of the telharmonium 'sound' can at least get hold of a tonewheel Hammond and achieve more or less the same results. Certainly easier to transport, despite the Hammond's obvious weight issue...you at least don't need a few railcars to move one of those.