Electrophones

What are electrophones?

Elektrophone is a group of musical instruments that reproduce sound events via headphones or loudspeakers with an audio amplifier. The term electrophone is derived from the Greek ‘Elektroklinger’ and is used in accordance with the extended Hornbostel-Sachs system system. The sound production and playing style are very diverse.

Electrophones are musical instruments that either generate a mechanical vibration (like the strings of an electric guitar) with electrical amplification or purely electronic sound generation using frequency generators (like an electronic organ or a synthesizer).

In a broader sense, MIDI devices can also be counted as electrophones. These either do not have their own sound input device or are only used to store corresponding MIDI commands (sequencers). As the boundaries to computer technology are fluid, it is not possible to categorize them precisely.

History of the electrophone

In German-language literature, especially in encyclopaedias, Prokop Diviš is named as the inventor of the first electrophone, the Denis d’or. However, this is based on a misleading formulation in the Reallexikon der Musikinstrumente by Curt Sachs from 1913, which refers to ‘electric mutation grand pianos’. The piano was electric. It could give the player an electric shock because it was a mutation. By contrast, the French Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Delaborde used the clavecin électrique to produce sound through frictional electricity as early as 1759.

Around 1900, the technically adept Berlin lawyer Richard Eisenmann, a student of Helmholtz, invented a device. This made it possible to use a piano to play other instruments, such as an organ or a stringed instrument imitated. It was also possible to make notes rise and fall. Eisenmann used a device to influence the vibrations of the strings and vary the timbre. This was very advanced for the time. Contemporary reports describe the construction as follows:

Contemporary reports describe it as an accumulator battery of ten cells, which is used to operate the piano. Each string is equipped with a horseshoe magnet. One end of each wire is connected to a common metal bar with all the other electromagnets. This is connected to the battery by a specially designed circuit breaker. The circuit breaker is switched on and off by a pedal. The current strength can also be changed by moving the pedal, resulting in the aforementioned modulations.