ABSTRACT
The quest to nd a whole new kind of musical instrument-one which makes its notes by purely electronic means-can be considered to have started with Helmholtz’s great work, On the Sensations of Tone, published in 1862. Before that date, true understanding of what made a musical note was incomplete. As I said right at the start of this book (see page 28) there are four obvious quantities which distinguish one note from another. The rst three, pitch, loudness and duration, are easy to understand. The fourth, timbre, is less so. Helmholtz was the rst to demonstrate that the timbre of a note was directly related to its harmonic structure. And so, just as you could always easily change the pitch or loudness or duration of a note; now it seemed that it should be every bit as easy to change the timbre.
