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Topic: Telharmonium

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Teleharmonium

Electronic musical instrument

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	Telharmonium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The Telharmonium was intended to be listened to using telephone receivers.
		This, combined with organ-like stops and multiple keyboards (the Telharmonium was polyphonic), as well as a number of foot pedals, meant that every sound could be sculpted and reshaped — the instrument was noted for its ability to reproduce common orchestral woodwind instruments such as the flute, bassoon, clarinet, and also the cello.
		In addition, problems began to arise when telephone broadcasts of Telharmonium music were subject to crosstalk and unsuspecting telephone users would be interrupted by strange electronic music.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Telharmonium (457 words)

	Gyrofrog: The Telharmonium
		Thaddeus Cahill (1867-1934) first patented his telharmonium a century ago in 1896, when he described the instrument as a large system capable of electrically generating, controlling, and shaping sounds, which could be reproduced through a loudspeaker system.
		The telharmonium generated its sounds using a system of alternators called "rheotomes." Each rheotome was actually a cog with a specific number of notched teeth.
		The telharmonium keyboard was touch-sensitive, just like that of a piano (it has taken until the last 15 years or so for the same feature to be incorporated into the modern synthesizer).
	www.gyrofrog.com /telharmo.html (647 words)

	IEEEVM: The Telharmonium
		The Iowa-born Cahill was a lawyer and sometime inventor, born in 1867.
		By the 1890s, Cahill was fascinated by the prospect of creating a new kind of musical instrument, one that would surpass what he saw as the limitations of all existing types, such as the limited range of notes they could play.
		The last Telharmonium, an even larger system, was installed in a special performance room in New York City from which Cahill and his investors planned to offer Telharmonium music concerts to hotels in the area for a fee.
	www.ieee-virtual-museum.org /collection/tech.php?taid=&id=2345951&lid=1 (446 words)

	History of Electronic Music
		Sometimes this led to an essay or treatise discussing ideas on how their invention might be used in the future, but it sometimes would lead to the invention of a new musical instrument.
		Because the Telharmonium was invented before amplifiers, the sound had to be played through horns (similar to an old record player), and was also adapted so that its signal could be sent through telephone lines.
		Cahill's idea was to broadcast classical music such as Chopin and Bach through the telephone to homes, hotels and restaurants in the Manhattan area, but the project turned out to be a failure due to technical and economic problems.
	www.albany.edu /~jm2126/isp361/float.html (706 words)

	CBC.ca - The Twonewhours Archives (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		The Telharmonium's only purpose was to supply enjoyable background music via telephone wires to paying clients such as hotels and restaurants.
		Its occasional just interval along with the uninteresting timbres the instrument produced and its loss of dynamic with each additional polyphonic voice were all part of the reason the instrument, weighing 200 tons, went in and out of fashion in a matter of months.
		I guess if there's anything to be said here is that Busoni's idealisation of the Telharmonium eventually had an effect on Varese who would later go on a crusade for the necessity of electronic instruments.
	interact.cbc.ca /pipermail/twonewhours/2003-October/012505.html (221 words)

	The Telharmonium: Electricity's Alliance With Music (1906)
		In the Cahill telharmonium we have changed all that, and we enter a pure democracy of musical electrical waves from among which, at will, those that please us best can be selected, to give us any tune or tone or timbre that we want.
		The performer at its keyboard, instead of playing upon air in the pipes, plays upon the electric current that is being generated in a large number of small dynamo-electric machines of the "alternating-current" type.
		When the telharmonium is played, a motor similarly sets it going, so that all the little interlocked rotors are revolved at once and offer their plastic currents to the facile touch of the performer to whose keyboard the wires from the alternators lead.
	earlyradiohistory.us /1906telh.htm (1316 words)

	Theremin
		The telharmonium itself was a kind of keyboard-operated dynamo organ; the bulk of the machine consisted of vast teethed gears on engine-driven spinning shafts which caused alternating currents in batteries of magnets.
		Actually there were no less than three telharmoniums, spread over some 20 years: the first Cahill had started in 1895 in Washington DC, patented in 1897, finished in 1900; the Holyoke-NYC model was the second; a third, begun in 1908, was finished in 1911 and certainly still in use in 1916.
		But by the mid-teens, radio broadcasts into the home were the coming thing, and the project went broke for lack of subscribers (though a similar device, the choralcelo, contemporary, smaller, more obscure, is reported to still have been in use in the 50s).
	www.thewire.co.uk /archive/essays/theremin.html (3801 words)

	Synthmuseum.com - Magazine
		The first performances of this Telharmonium (or as Cahill called it the Dynamophone) were made from the Cabot Street Mill workshop and were transmitted to the Hotel Hamilton about a half-mile away.
		The New York debut of the Telharmonium (or Dynamophone as it was sometimes called) was on September 26th, 1906.
		Although the Telharmonium had separate cables, they were laid right next the phone company cables and, due to the strength of the Telharmonium's signal, there was significant crosstalk.
	www.synthmuseum.com /magazine/0102jw.html (1929 words)

	Telharmonium (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Before inventing the Telharmonium, he mostly invented devices for Pianos and Typewriters.
		In 1898 he was granted, patent #580,035 for the "Art of and Apparatus for Generating and Distributing Music Electrically." In his patent, Cahill used the term "synthesizing." This proves, some say, that the Telharmonium was truly the world's first Synthesizer.
		In February 1912, the new Telharmonium was demonstrated at Caregie Hall.
	apm.brookes.ac.uk /glekkas/EM11/Telharmonium.html (521 words)

	Blogger: Email Post to a Friend
		The Telharmonium and its inventor represent one of the most spectacular examples of one side of a recurrent dialectic which we will see demonstrated repeatedly throughout the 20th century history of the artistic use of electronic technology.
		Their interest was not to use the emerging electronic potential to imitate existent forms, but rather to go beyond what was already known.
		In the same year that Cahill finalized the Telharmonium and moved it to New York City, the composer Ferruccio Busoni wrote his Entwurf einer neuen �sthetik der Tonkunst ('Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music') wherein he proposed the necessity for an expansion of the chromatic scale and new (possibly electrical) instruments to realize it.
	www.blogger.com /email-post.g?blogID=8229422&postID=109790219882501824 (930 words)

	THE INVENTORS
		The Telharmonium supplied 1 amp of power to each telephone receiver on the network, however later on over the years, he realized that using the telephone receivers did cause interference with telephone calls.
		The sound produced from the Telharmonium at Telharmonic Hall, was many times filled with cable trasmission interferneces and as sudden drops in volume, which led to a 'highly irritating' concert.
		Although Cahill and the 'New England Electric Music Company' had a wonderful vision of installed the Telharmonium in hotels, restaurants, and private home using the telephone network, however it proved to be a failure because of the interference with telephone calls.
	www.mtholyoke.edu /~ambeach/webproj/webproj5.html (771 words)

	Electronic Musician: The Electronic Century PART I: BEGINNINGS (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		In 1906, the Telharmonium was dismantled and transported to New York City, where it was reassembled in the newly established Telharmonic Hall at 39th Street and Broadway (see Fig.
		The Telharmonium was played by two performers seated at a two-keyboard console that was installed on the ground floor.
		He shipped the Telharmonium back to Holyoke, took control of the company, and made a valiant attempt at a comeback with a third and improved model.
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m0FGL/is_2_16/ai_60069277 (1429 words)

	Illwired.com - The History and Development of Electronic Music (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		The Telharmonium produced a surprisingly soft, almost orchestral sound, taking the public by storm with its novel approach.
		However, not long after its debut, Cahill’s Telharmonium proved that its instant publicity was little more than a fad, and was soon eclipsed by the release of new a Wurlitzer organ in 1914.
		Though the Telharmonium was a momentous development in the history of electronic music, it is often Leon Theremin, with his “Theremin” (often referred to as the “Aetherphon”), who is considered to be the grandfather of all electronic music.
	www.illwired.com /mt/v3/electronicmusic.shtml (3493 words)

	NewMusicBox
		This property, together with the development of vacuum tube circuitry, led to the decommissioning of the third and last Telharmonium in 1916.
		The Telharmonium was controlled from a multiple-keyboard console designed to accommodate two players.
		Cahill's keyboard was actually touch-sensitive (a feature lacking in most of its descendants in the electronic organ world); as each key was connected to a mechanism that adjusted the alignment of two coils in a coupling transformer, the amplitude of the signal was a function of the key depression.
	www.newmusicbox.org /article.nmbx?id=325 (2683 words)

	Thaddeus Cahill: Raw Deal (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		So he invented the Telharmonium - the world's most perfect, most massive, and most expensive musical instrument - in 1901.
		The Telharmonium, although it performed flawlessly, was shunned as impractical.
		Thaddeus died bankrupt and forgotten and his mighty multi-ton machines (he built three) were broken up for scrap.
	www.blastbooks.com /RAWDEAL/Cahill/fr2cahl.htm (165 words)

	NET NOTES
		The Gyrofrog site (www.io.com/~jcastle/music.html) tells the fascinating story of how Cahill patented his invention in 1896, describing it as a "large system capable of electrically generating, controlling, and shaping sounds, which could be reproduced through a loudspeaker system" (and later down phone lines).
		A Telharmonium system was actually installed in New York in the early 1900s, requiring an entire floor of a large building to itself.
		The plans never came to as much as Cahill had hoped, but the Telharmonium scored a number of firsts, including the development of a sound-producing technique which was used much later on in Hammond organs.
	www.soundonsound.com /sos/dec99/articles/netnotes.htm (1793 words)

	Dynamophone (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		The Dynamophone, also known as the telharmonium, was an electric based sound-generation system (phonographs had been invented some twenty years previous, but were recording devices, not sound generators).
		The Telharmonium supplied 1 amp of power to each telephone receiver on the network this was much more than the telephone itself but was enough to be able to hear the music without lifting the receiver speaker to the ear however this also masked and disrupted any other signal on the line.
		Radio, which had been around for five years, would soon be strong enough to cause the Dynamophones demise anyway.
	csunix1.lvc.edu /~snyder/em/dyna.html (640 words)

	MUSICAL MILESTONES OF THE 20TH CENTURY
		That the Telharmonium - the conception of a young lawyer and inventor named Thaddeus Cahill - was an ultimate failure should not deny it a place in history, as its conception led to the development of today’s sophisticated musical electronics.
		At the prices listed (as much as $169 for a BetacamSP) the Telharmonium cassette may be a slow seller to the public at large, if indeed there is one for the history of electronic music.
		But it is so carefully put together and so fascinating to view that we cannot help but recommend it to anyone with a working interest in the subject.
	www.newmusicon.org /v8n1/v81vid.html (565 words)

	Video History Project: Resources - Tools - Individual Text
		To give a more complete account on this history, it is important to include the time span that preceded the purely electronic era, and also to include some history of electronic (and electrical) instruments whose sound modification devices formed an integral part of the entire system.
		A classic case is the Telharmonium, by Thaddeus Cahill which was built around 1896 [I]-[10].
		After the Telharmonium, and especially after the invention of the vacuum tube, scores of electronic (and electronic mechanical) musical instruments were invented with sound modification features.
	www.experimentaltvcenter.org /history/tools/ttext.php3?id=1 (4302 words)

	[No title]
		1.3.2 The Telharmonium; an instrument ahead of its time With the technological emphasis on the development of communication systems, it is interesting to note that the first large-scale electrical musical instrument was concerned with the transmission of music across the telephone network.
		Figure 1.3: One of the Telharmonium’s generator wheels (left) and user interface (right) Limited mixing of sine waves was possible (a crude form of additive synthesis) which gave the player some creative control of the timbre produced.
		Unlike the Telharmonium, the Theremin attracted a steady stream of interest from composers and was later used in popular music, for example by the Beach Boys (as the solo instrument in Good Vibrations).
	www-users.york.ac.uk /~elec18/download/adh_thesis/Ch1.doc (10239 words)

	IEEE Virtual Museum: Electronic Music: From Singing Arcs to the Theremin
		Underlying these new inventions was the problem of providing waves of current at precisely the correct frequencies to produce music electrically, in the air, in a telephone receiver, or in some form of electromagnetic device.
		The Telharmonium approached this problem with banks of customized AC generators, each designed to generate a particular frequency, but Lee De Forest’s Audion Piano did it a different way, using electron tubes as tone generators.
		The Telharmonium’s numerous AC generators were far too bulky, and the Audion Piano (and electron-tube organs in general) was difficult to keep in tune, because of the way the conducting properties of electron tubes changed as the temperature inside the tubes changed.
	www.ieee-virtual-museum.org /exhibit/exhibit.php?id=159271&lid=1 (656 words)

	Review 0489 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Just in case, we will warn you that Weidenaar, one of the best acquainted with the history of Telharmonium, the amazing 200-ton electric instrument that created numerous musical timbres, has produced a video of an incredible worth for the aficionado.
		All images and dialogue are historically authentic; most of the music selections are known to have been performed on the instrument.
		However, no known recordings of the Telharmonium exist, so the music was recreated on a Yamaha synthesizer.
	www.amazings.com /reviews/review0489.html (223 words)

	telharmonium - OneLook Dictionary Search
		Tip: Click on the first link on a line below to go directly to a page where "telharmonium" is defined.
		Telharmonium : Online Plain Text English Dictionary [home, info]
		Telharmonium : Rane Professional Audio Reference [home, info]
	www.onelook.com /?w=telharmonium&loc=resrd (156 words)

	electronic music : Thaddeus Cahill and the Telharmonium
		Thaddeus Cahill is considered the inventor of the first serious musical electronic instrument.
		Cahill was able to use the telharmonium to imitate common orchestral instruments like the oboe, cello or violin.
		The first large telharmonium was gigantic, it occupied the better part of the factory it was located in.
	www.electronicmusic.com /education/5335.html (114 words)

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