AETHERPHON, global theremin family

On 5 Dec 2009, at 07:15, Mary Jones wrote:

> >You may like to consider an alternative approach - thinking of the
> >theremin not as a melodic instrument but as an ur-synthesizer and an
> >instrument of electronic and experimental music.
>
> I have to say that you're moving out of my turf. I am going to have  
> to sit with this concept a while to assimalate it, I think. I'm  
> conditioned totally into pitch and tone quality in producing on an  
> instrument. My forte is classical piano and harp. Outside of being  
> a amateur radio operator (my son is, too) we have no electrical  
> experience. I'm willing to explore this area. It's just foreign to me.

I know what you mean. I bought my first theremin on a whim without  
giving much consideration to my lack of musical training, and it felt  
very daring and radical to go against all the advice available from  
classical theremin players, but at the same time the logic of using  
an electronic instrument to make electronic music was undeniable.

Now, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight I think of it as "the music  
I didn't notice" - during my formative years the BBC Radiophonic  
Workshop was in its heyday, producing soundtracks not just for family  
favourites like Doctor Who, Bleep And Booster and The Tomorrow People  
but also the majority of educational programming that we watched at  
school in the 60's and 70's. (I'm 47.) Your experiences may vary  
depending on your taste in TV programmes, but it is still to be found  
in the atmospheric soundtracks of certain sci-fi, surreal and horror  
movies, and some pop-science documentaries. (This, incidentally is  
why I produce little videos to go with my recordings - it places the  
sounds in a context where the listener might be more familiar with  
them. And for me the process of creating them is a way of thinking  
about and making sense of what I have recorded.)

For a "jumping in at the deep end" introduction to the early days of  
electronic music you could do far worse than renting a copy of  
Forbidden Planet.

This is what Wikipedia says about the soundtrack:

"The movie's innovative electronic music score (credited as  
"electronic tonalities", partly to avoid having to pay movie industry  
music guild fees) was composed by Louis and Bebe Barron. MGM producer  
Dore Schary discovered the couple quite by chance at a beatnik  
nightclub in Greenwich Village while on a family Christmas visit to  
New York City. Schary hired them on the spot to compose the film  
music score. The theremin (which was not used in Forbidden Planet)  
had been used as early as 1945, in Spellbound, but their score is  
widely credited with being the first completely electronic film  
score. The soundtrack preceded the Moog synthesizer of 1964 by almost  
a decade.
"Using equations from the 1948 book, Cybernetics: Or, Control and  
Communication in the Animal and the Machine by mathematician Norbert  
Wiener, Louis Barron constructed the electronic circuits which he  
used to generate the "bleeps, blurps, whirs, whines, throbs, hums and  
screeches". Most of the tonalities were generated using a circuit  
called a ring modulator. After recording the base sounds, the Barrons  
further manipulated the material by adding effects, such as  
reverberation and delay, and reversing or changing the speed of  
certain sounds."

(On a side note - if you know how a ham radio works you are a good  
step towards understanding how a theremin works - at the core it  
heterodynes two RF waveforms to produce an audible beat frequency.  
"Ring modulators" - as mentioned above - are essentially the same,  
but processing waveforms in the audio range rather than at radio  
frequencies.)



One final suggestion - ear training for this sort of music - I  
practice something called "deep listening" - listening to the sounds  
that fill our everyday lives with the same attention that one would  
give to a classical concert. The world has become an increasingly  
noisy place since the Industrial Revolution, and mostly we filter  
them out - but the sounds we ignore are the basis of the music we  
didn't notice. :-)



Gordon Charlton