ABSTRACT
Designing voltage-controlled electronic music components was less practical until the affordability of transistorized, solid-state electronic music components in the 1960s. Homer Dudley’s vocoder, designed to analyze and reproduce the sound of the human voice, generated control voltages to shape the envelope and amplification of the input signal it was analyzing. Harald Bode, a German engineer who developed many electronic instruments and components found in the first European studios, developed a voltage-controlled amplifier in 1959 as part of a broader modular sound modification system. Raymond Scott was a commercial musician and inventor of electronic musical instruments whose work largely went unnoticed because he worked privately rather than as part of institution. Among the instruments that emerged in the early days of analog synthesis was the Synket invented by Polish–Italian sound engineer Paul Ketoff in 1963. The Fonosynth was retired by the mid-Sixties because of the availability of voltage-controlled synthesizers that were more compact and could be easily managed for making music.
