excerpt from the foreword
by robert moog

...Electronic musical instrument technology during the past century has developed through the contributions of many intuition-inspired innovations.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, even before the invention of the vacuum tube, the patent attorney and inventor Thaddeus Cahill envisioned a music production and distribution system in which tones were produced by 15-kilowatt electrical generators and distributed over wires similar to telephone lines. With investors' backing, Cahill actually installed such a system in midtown Manhattan. Known as the telharmonium, his system was not a commercial success, but it did foretell the development of the Hammond organ, the electronic music synthesizer, and Muzak.

Just a few years after the introduction of the triode vacuum tube, Leon Theremin noticed that whistles from an improperly adjusted radio could be varied by hand motion. From that, he proceeded to develop the space-controlled electronic musical instrument that bears his name. (By the way, Theremin was also the first to develop color television, during the same period that he did his groundbreaking work with electronic musical instruments.) Another early visionary, Maurice Martenot, used circuitry similar to that used by Theremin to design a strikingly innovative keyboard-controlled instrument.

Throughout the 1930s and continuing after the Second World War, dozens upon dozens of innovators developed novel electronic musical instruments of all sorts. As electronic technology has itself advanced, the cosmic network has constantly hummed with ideas for new devices that musicians could play.

Few of the early electronic music innovations such as the trautonium, the hellertion, the crea-tone, the oscillion, and the emiriton have become widely accepted. In contrast, today's popular music simply would not exist without the music technology of the past half century or so. Why have most early electronic musical instruments fallen into obscurity, while many recent developments such as the keyboard synthesizer, the phaser, and the fuzz box have become part of the growing electronic musical instrument industry?

Rapidly evolving electronic technology is only part of the answer. The complete answer must take into account the evolution of the cultural environment in which we are immersed. Just as a musician interacts with her instrument as her music evolves, technology and our culture are constantly interacting as they themselves evolve. The stories in this book, of how synthesizers came into being, provide fascinating and revealing insights into how technical, commercial, and cultural trends shape one another. In addition, I believe you will find that the stories also shed light on the cosmic network, and how it contributes to human creativity and innovation.