ABSTRACT
The Hammond organs had adopted electromagnetic design elements rather than noisy contact switches and, although still heavy, were compact enough to be adopted into the home market, as well as for stage, and theatre use. The Theremin, which has experienced a great revival in recent years with Robert Moog’s part-digital Theremini released in 2014, avoided the problems associated with keyboard control by offering a single sound, controlled not by a keyboard but by the player’s proximity to two capacitance-sensitive aerials. Several other electronic instrument designs introduced in the early part of the twentieth century also had some impact with composers, while hardly entering the domestic market at all. The Minimoog has become all-time classic analog synthesizer, both for its sound and for its logical design and layout. By the 1870s, with the telegraph system using Neal Morse code bleeps spread almost throughout the USA, pioneers such as Elisha Gray were experimenting with adding elementary keyboards to collections of oscillator circuits.
