From Telharmonium to Laptop: The Story of the Synthesizer
In 1968 a record of Bach appeared that sounded like nothing before it. The counterpoint was familiar, but every voice buzzed, chirped and glowed with tones no orchestra could make. Switched-On Bach, made by Wendy Carlos on a wall of patch cables and knobs, became one of the best-selling classical albums of its time and introduced millions of listeners to a new instrument: the synthesizer.
Yet the synthesizer did not appear from nowhere. Its story stretches back to a machine weighing as much as a locomotive, runs through university laboratories and garage workshops, and leads to the phone and laptop in your pocket. It is a story of engineers who loved music and musicians who were not afraid of electricity.
Electric Dreams Before the Synthesizer
The first great attempt to make music from electricity was the Telharmonium of Thaddeus Cahill, patented in 1897 and demonstrated in the first decade of the twentieth century. It generated tones with huge rotating dynamos, weighed around two hundred tons, and sent music down telephone lines to subscribers. It was a commercial failure, but it proved the idea.
The 1920s and 1930s brought smaller, playable electronic instruments: the touchless theremin around 1920, the French ondes Martenot in 1928 and the German Trautonium around 1930. In 1939 Hammond introduced the Novachord, an early polyphonic electronic instrument. By the 1950s, the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer, installed at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, could be programmed with punched paper tape. It was enormous and expensive, and only specialists could use it, but it gave the instrument its name.
The 1960s: Moog and Buchla
The modern synthesizer was born in the mid-1960s, at almost the same moment on opposite coasts of the United States. In New York State, Robert Moog, an engineer who had built theremins since his teens, worked with the composer Herb Deutsch to create modules controlled by voltage: an oscillator, a filter and an amplifier that could all be patched together and played from a keyboard. Moog showed his modules at an Audio Engineering Society convention in 1964, and orders began to arrive.
In San Francisco, Don Buchla was building his own modular instruments for composers at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, including Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender. Buchla avoided the conventional piano keyboard, favouring touch plates and sequencers, and his approach encouraged experimental sounds rather than imitation of familiar instruments. Musicians still speak of an East Coast and a West Coast style of synthesis because of these two inventors.
Moog's large modular systems found their way into studios, film scores and pop records. Switched-On Bach showed that the machines could be musical as well as strange, and rock bands quickly wanted a piece of the new sound.
The Minimoog Takes the Stage
Modular systems were bulky, fragile and needed a tangle of cables to make any sound. In 1970 Moog's company released the Minimoog, a compact instrument with its key modules wired together inside one case and controlled by knobs and switches. It could be carried to a gig, set up quickly and played like a keyboard.
The Minimoog became a defining sound of 1970s progressive rock, jazz fusion and funk. Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, Jan Hammer and Parliament-Funkadelic's Bernie Worrell all used it, and Kraftwerk's Autobahn (1974) helped point electronic music toward the future. Competitors followed, including ARP Instruments in the US, with the ARP 2600 and Odyssey, and EMS in Britain, with the VCS3.
Polyphony, Memory and the Digital Revolution
Early synthesizers mostly played one note at a time. In the late 1970s instruments such as the Yamaha CS-80 and the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 (1978) offered several voices at once, and the Prophet-5 could store sounds in memory thanks to a microprocessor, so a player could switch from one patch to another instantly on stage. Vangelis's score for Blade Runner (1982) remains a celebrated showcase for the CS-80.
Then came the digital wave. Expensive systems such as the Fairlight CMI and the Synclavier introduced sampling and digital sound design to top studios around 1979 and 1980. In 1983 Yamaha released the DX7, based on frequency modulation synthesis developed by John Chowning at Stanford University. Affordable and bright-sounding, it became one of the best-selling synthesizers in history, and its electric piano and bell tones are all over the pop music of the decade.
A Common Language: MIDI
Also in 1983, manufacturers led by Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits and Ikutaro Kakehashi of Roland introduced MIDI, a standard that let synthesizers, drum machines and computers from different companies talk to each other. It quietly transformed music production and is still in use more than forty years later.
Software and the Modular Revival
As personal computers grew more powerful in the 1990s, synthesis moved into software. Steinberg's VST plug-in standard, introduced in 1996, allowed virtual instruments to run inside recording programs, and soon software could emulate classic analogue machines or create entirely new ones. Making electronic music no longer required a room full of hardware, only a computer.
At the same time, many musicians rediscovered the hands-on joy of knobs and cables. Analogue synthesizers returned to production, original designs were reissued, and the compact Eurorack modular format, launched by Doepfer in the mid-1990s, grew into a large ecosystem of small makers. In a sense the synthesizer had come full circle, back to patch cords and voltage control.
The Synthesizer Today
Today synthesizers are everywhere: in film and game soundtracks, in pop, hip hop and dance music, and in classrooms where students learn how sound works. Web technologies now let synthesis run directly in a browser. You can explore oscillators, filters and envelopes on HarmonyHub's free online synthesizer, which includes presets and step-by-step tutorials, or experiment with pure waveforms using the tone generator.
Sound Without Limits
From Cahill's dynamos to Moog's modules and today's software, the synthesizer has always been about one idea: that sound itself can be designed. Each generation of engineers and musicians has pushed that idea further, and the instrument that once filled a room now fits in a browser tab, still waiting for someone to discover a sound no one has heard before.