history of electronic music

Synth Britannia is a BBC documentary about synth music in the UK.

VideodromeDisco posted this to YouTube – so you might want to watch it right now.

Ever wondered what it was like making electronic music in the late 1950s?

Now you can find out – without having to learn tape-splicing.

Gleetchplug has announced Berna – a “vintage electronic studio simulation.”

It’s got reel-to-reel recorders, oscillators, tape delay – what more do you need to make electronic music?

Release date: Monday November 2nd 2009. Price 10.69€

I can say no more at this time – but you may want to look for a lab coat.

This is a demo of a vintage Maplin 5600s analog synthesizer.

In the early 70’s, the Australian magazine Electronics Today International published Tervor Marshall’s designs for two partly digital, mostly analog, Electronic Music Synthesisers. the ETI 3600 and ETI 4600.

Both were made available as kits of components. Barry Wilkinson at ETI was responsible for the final packaging and kitting coordination. Maplin Electronics Ltd.(in the UK) subsequently picked up the designs, which they marketed as as the Maplin models 3800 and 5600s Electronic Music Synthesizers. Read more…

Kid Baltan (Dick Raaijmakers) and Tom Dissevelt at Philips “Nat. Lab” in 1959, explaining how electronic tape music is made.

Broadcast by VARA television (Netherlands) on January 17, 1959

via schreu26

The ANS synthesizer (named after Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin) is a photoelectronic musical instrument created by Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin between 1937 to 1957.

The synthesizers uses cinematography, which makes it possible to “photograph” a sound wave, as well as synthesizing a sound from a drawn sound wave.

The introduction is in Russian, but about 4:15 into the video, the ANS synthesizer is demonstrated.

Here’s a Googlish translation of the text that accompanies the video:

Synthesizer [ANS] photoelectronic musical tool is designed by Russian inventor by Eugene [Murzinym] in 1958. With the aid of [ANSa] the composer can create music of any colorings in the directly reverberating form, without the musicians of executors, he writes sounds on the glass, necessary to it, covered with the opaque nondrying paint, removing by cutters paint in the specific places. This glass- is the unique musical score of tool, working on the musical score of synthesizer, composer it becomes similar to artist, who records the picture: it tints, it retouches, it erases and new code figures are brought, achieving auditory control of the obtained result.

The freedom of work in this musical score conceals the inexhaustible possibilities.

Invention was named by the designer “OF [ANS]” in the honor of composer Alexander Nikolayevich [Skryabina]. The large part of the music to the films Andrey Tarkovsky [Eduard] [Artemev] wrote with the aid of [ANS].

Video demonstrates experiment; [ANS] reproduces the figure of the artist of Svetlana [Bogatyr] ” Unknown Of [miry]“. On October 21, 2009 [GTSMMK] [im]. OF [M].[I]. Of [glinki] concert [posvyashchennyy] to 95- anniversary from the birthday of Eugene Alexandrovich [Murzina].

If you can summarize the commentary from the video, leave a comment below! Read more…