of Microprocessors

MUSIC SYNTHESIS PRINCIPLES 37
have to be carefully drafted. More complex or simultaneous tones would be
even more difficult. In spite of these problems, at least one interesting but
short and simple piece was created· in this way.
Like the Teleharmonium, the concept of drawing waveforms directly is
now fairly common. Computers and sophisticated programs, however, do the
tedious waveform calculation and combination tasks.
The Tape Recorder
Without question, the most significant development in electronics for
music synthesis as well as music recording was the tape recorder. The
Germans first developed the wire recorder during World War II, and it was
subsequently refined to utilize iron-oxide-coated paper tape. Plastic film
bases were later developed, and now magnetic tape is the highest fidelity
analog sound recording technique in common use.
When on tape, sound becomes a physical object that can be cut,
stretched, rearranged, molded, and easily re-recorded. A new breed of
abstract composers did just that and the result, called "musique concrete,"
sounded like nothing that had ever been heard before. In fact, before the
popularization of synthesizer music, the public's conception of electronic
ml:lsic was of this form, which they usually characterized as a seemingly
random collection of outrageous sounds.
The name musique concrete stems from the fact that most, if not all, of
the sounds used were natural in origin, i.e., concrete. Popular source material
included water drips, sneezes, and squeaky door hinges. Typical manipulations
included gross speeding or slowing of the recorded sound, dicing the
tape and rearranging parts of the sound often with segments in reverse,
overdubbing to create simultaneous copies of the sound, and other tricks.
Occasionally, a small amount of electronic equipment was used to filter and
modify the sound in various ways. Regardless of the actual source material,
the distortions were so severe that the final result was completely unrecognizable.
Although usage of this sound material need not result in abstract
compositions, it usually did. The primary difficulty was in achieving accurate
enough control of the distortion processes to produce more conventional
pitch and rhythmic sequences. Unfortunately, musique concrete did very
little to popularize electronic music techniques, although it undoubtedly
gratified a small circle of composers and listeners.
RCA Mark II Synthesizer
Over the years, many special-purpose electronic musical instruments
were developed and used. One example is the theremin (1920), which was an
electronic tone source whose frequency and amplitude could be independently
conrrolled by hand-waving near two metal plates. Others include a