Electricity first recorded music, then started making it. This lesson follows the instruments that produced sound with no string, skin or pipe.
The theremin
The theremin is played without being touched. Its inventor, Leon Theremin, patented it in 1928. Two metal antennas sense the position of the player's hands: each antenna forms half of a capacitor, and the hand is the other half.
Tape as an instrument
By the 1940s, magnetic tape let musicians record sounds and change them by altering the tape's speed or direction. Musique concrète, created in Paris in 1948, edited together recorded fragments of natural and industrial sounds. In 1953 Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany made the first music produced solely from electronic generators.
The synthesizer
The American engineer Robert Moog invented his modular synthesizer in 1964. Its oscillators produce waveforms that are filtered to shape the sound, subtractive synthesis, or used to control other modules as low-frequency oscillators. Moog also introduced modularity and the envelope generator. Wendy Carlos's "Switched-On Bach" (1968) took it to the mainstream, and in 1970 Moog Music released the portable Minimoog.
The sampler
Tape-based keyboards such as the Mellotron came first, expensive and heavy. The first commercial sampling synthesizer was Harry Mendell's Computer Music Melodian (1976), and the first polyphonic digital one the Australian Fairlight CMI (1979), recording at 8 bits. Cheaper machines followed: the E-mu Emulator, the Akai S950 and the Akai MPC.
The drum machine
Roland made the TR-808 Rhythm Composer from 1980 to 1983. Unlike the dearer Linn LM-1, it made its sounds with analogue synthesis, not samples. It was a commercial failure; about 12,000 were built. Then, cheap on the used market, it won a cult following for its deep, booming bass drum, and became central to hip-hop, house and trap: see Styles of the world.
| Year | Instrument | What was new |
|---|---|---|
| 1928 | Theremin | Played without contact |
| 1964 | Moog modular | Oscillators, filters, envelopes |
| 1970 | Minimoog | A portable, self-contained synthesizer |
| 1979 | Fairlight CMI | Polyphonic digital sampling |
| 1980 | Roland TR-808 | Programmable analogue drums |
Sources
Every date, name, tempo and origin on this page comes from these pages, read on 2026-10-24.