Leon theremin book
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Between “Bad Things” and “Good Vibrations”: Leon Theremin and his T-Vox
During the glasnost period when many forgotten biographies were rediscovered and rewritten, one of the most bizarre finds was the Soviet-American inventor and pioneer of electr(on)ic music, Lev Sergeevich Termen (aka Léon Theremin, 1896-1993). Termen, “the secret link between sci-fi films, the Beach Boys, and Carnegie Hall,” whose “electronic musical instrument took the world by storm in the 1920s and ’30s”() — several decades before the rise of electronic popular music — had been forgotten for 50 years in the East and West.
Some remembered this name, though–among them were Robert Moog, the American pioneer of the synthesizer.() Few musicians using the 70s’ Minimoogs or the Moog Tauruses knew that the invention of artificial sound originated in early Soviet Russia. The synthesizer is actually the later form of a music machine invented by a Russian in 1919 and produced in the USA in the 30s: the theremin or thereminvox (Termen’s voice).
For Western music and technology buffs familiar
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Creepy Music and Soviet Spycraft: The Amazing Life of Leon Theremin
Imagine a UFO descending from the heavens, its round disk pale against the night sky. What sound does it make? You’re likely imagining a keening whine in your head, like the howling of a haunted wind or the moans of a high-pitched ghost.
That’s the sound of the theremin, a musical instrument invented nearly a century ago. It was one of the first electronic musical instruments, and the first to be mass-produced. The theremin’s ethereal tones made it ubiquitous in science fiction film scores during the middle of the 20th century.
But the curious instrument was actually invented decades earlier, in 1920, by a Russian scientist named Lev Sergeyevich Termen. As a young man working at the Physical Technical Institute in Petrograd, he noticed that something odd happened when he hooked up audio circuits to an electrical device called an oscillator in a certain configuration. The oscillator produced an audible tone when he held his hands near it, and he could shift the tone just by waving his hands back and forth.
A cl
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Leon Theremin
Just a few years after the invention of the vacuum tube, Leon Theremin invented one of the world’s first and most unique electronic musical intruments: the aetherphone, better known as the Theremin.
Lev Sergeyevich Termen was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1896. Like many inventors, he was a youthful enthusiast of both music (he played the cello) and physics. After enrolling at the University of Petrograd, he concentrated his studies in the nascent field of electrical engineering. There, he was repairing a radio when he conceived the idea of an essentially electronic musical instrument: not just an acoustic instrument embellished or amplified electronically, but an instrument that would produce purely electronic music.
In 1918, Theremin built the prototype of his “aetherphone.” It was fairly simple in shape: a wooden box, mounted on four legs, with a straight antenna rising up from its top and a P-shaped loop antenna extending horizontally from its left side. Inside the box, the antennas were connected
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