Not A Radio...
Not A Phonograph...
Not Like Anything You Have Ever Heard...

Since time began, or at least since the time of Philip Larkin's poem, Annus Mirabilis, "between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP", every teenage boy has wanted to be a rock star, to pick up a guitar and please the waiting crowds. The trouble has always been that few can play as well as they would like to, and even fewer have progressed beyond accompanying very loud records on air guitar when mum and dad are out of the house, and sustaining even louder arguments when mum and dad come back in.

Air guitar is all very well - the shapes are right, the accompaniment sounds good - but its not the real thing, and doesn't make the right noise. It's all about making the right shapes, falling to your knees, pouting at the mic, and imagining the noise.

But all that has changed. A group at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland has come up with the ultimate accessory for every adolescent's bedroom, a virtual air guitar. The virtual air guitar makes notes out of thin air, and brings the shapes to life.

You simply prance in front of a camera that is attached to your computer, and wear a pair of orange gloves, and the software makes music out of your shapes. Just like the real thing. And you can't go wrong. Press the footpedal, whirl your right hand in an arc, and hit the chords. Press the pedal again and you become the soloist, Jimi Hendrix or Jorma Kaukonen, Hawkwind, Jimmy Page or Joe Satriani. Play hard and the guitar plays with you. Thrash and scream and the guitar screams with you. And the magic part is that it reads your shapes and plays in tune. You can't go wrong. Every solo is different and in tune, and you don't have to learn the notes.

And better than that - you're on film, and can see yourself play.

The day the earth stood still
The original "no hands" electronic musical instrument that you didn't hit, tap, blow, suck or pluck was the aetherphone, or Theremin. The aetherphone was invented during the surge in creativity that immediately followed the Russian Revolution, when optimism was high among the people and the poets and the painters, the artists and scientists, and hope had yet to be snuffed out by the deadening hand of the Bolsheviks. Yesenin and Mayakovsky were in their pomp. Arthur Ransome, the author of 'Swallows and Amazons', was Trotsky's private secretary. Jaroslav Hasek and Marc Chagall were Red Army commissars. Within a few short years they were all in exile, or dead.

The aetherphone was the work of Lev Sergeyevich Theremin, an astronomer, cellist and student of physics from Petrograd, who came up with the idea when repairing a radio in 1918. Like the virtual air guitar, the aetherphone was a thing of magic and wonder, an instrument that was played without physical contact between the musician and the instrument, the electrical expression of constructivism, the art movement of the revolution. The aetherphone was patented in 1921, and was first demonstrated later that year at the 8th annual All-Russia Electrical Engineering Conference. In 1924, the invention is said to have been presented to Lenin - as a potential burglar alarm.

The aetherphone consisted of a wooden cabinet, standing on four legs and filled with coils and vacuum tubes. On top of the cabinet were two antennae - a vertical rod and a P-shaped loop of metal extending horizontally from its left side. The antennae were connected to high frequency oscillators made from vacuum tubes that hid inside the cabinet.
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The sound was produced by the oscillators. The musician stood between the antennae and waved his or her hands in the air across and between the antennae. The straight antenna controlled the pitch, and the P-shaped loop controlled the volume. Waving of the hands varied the volume and tone, and was a precise art. The aetherphone had a range of about two and a half octaves either side of middle C and was hard to play.

Played by an expert, of which there were few, the tone could be ethereal and exquisite. Played less well the sound became haunting and eerie, which is probably why the aetherphone, now better known as the Theremin, became more famous as the ultimate accompaniment to the film noir epics and scary sci-fi movies of the forties and fifties - "The Day the Earth Stood Still", "It Came from Outer Space", "The Delicate Delinquent" and "The Lost Weekend" - and for brightening the Bela Lugosi moments in the best of the worst of Ed Wood. "Always, the spooky", complained Clara Rockmore, the greatest exponent and publiciser of the instrument.

But perhaps the most famous three minutes in the history of the Theremin was its part in the arrangement of Brian Wilson's biggest hit for the Beach Boys, 'Good Vibrations'. Although, in fact, the woos on 'Good Vibrations' that everybody supposes to have been made by a Theremin were actually made by a Tarrenin, an instrument that sounds similar (if more controlled) but has a keyboard to simplify the selection of notes. More recently the Theremin has been used to ornament the music of the likes of Blur, Todd Rundgren and Goldfrapp, and is sometimes played by the English comedian, Bill Bailey.

Look. No hands
In 1927, Theremin was allowed to leave the USSR and tour Europe, playing symphonies that had been specially composed for aetherphone and orchestra. By the end of that year he had reached New York, where he played before huge audiences and was heard by Rachmaninov and Toscanini, among others. By 1929, RCA had purchased the rights to manufacture and market the Theremin, or "thereminvox", under license.

"Having made the enjoyment of music universally possible," the publicity said, "RCA takes another tremendous step - making possible not merely the enjoyment of other people's music, but the actual creation and performance of one's own music! Now, for the first time in the history of music, anyone, without musical knowledge or training of any sort, anyone, without even the ability to read notes; without tiresome or extended "practice"; without keys, or bow, or reed, or string, or wind - without material media of any kind - anyone can make exquisite beautiful music with nothing but his own two hands!

Move Your Hands in the Air and You Make Music

This sounds impossible ... but it is a very real, a thrilling, amazing, gloriously delightful reality. To Professor Leon Tlieremin. distinguished young Russian scientist, the world owes a debt for his conception of the idea which has been developed into this unbelievable instrument, the RCA Theremin."

The keenest thrill
In New York, Theremin met Clara Rockmore, a Lithuanian emigre violinist who was to become the virtuoso of the Theremin, and gave life to Theremin's hope that the instrument would be less a novelty toy and more a classical intrument, to be played by serious musicians in front of serious orchestras.

The Theremin was not an easy instrument to play, requiring physical dexterity and acute awareness of pitch, but Rockmore was known for the extreme sensitivity of her playing, feathering the air above the antennae with her sensitive fingers and a delicate touch, playing everything from Rachmaninov to Stravinsky and beyond. A number of contemporary composers wrote pieces specifically for the Theremin. The English composer, Percy Grainger wrote "Free Music #1 for four theremins", and Rockmore led performances in front of an orchestra of Theremins with moveable stages and lighting. Theremin himself played with the New York Philharmonic and entertained thousands.

Despite the critical success, and perhaps because of the depression, the RCA Theremin was not a great success, and in 1938 Theremin was spirited away from the streets of New York by Russian agents and taken to the Soviet Union, where he spent a year in prison. During his years in exile he had worked as an officer of the KGB.

This does not detract from the wonders of the instrument that RCA called The First Non-Mechanical Musical Instrument.
"It has been the fashion to say that everything is done by machinery nowadays... that musical marvels such as the modern radio and the marvelous electrical phonographs have reacted against the development of "home-made" music. RCA's answer to that line of thought is the RCA THEREMIN... the first musical instrument in the history of the world that is not a machine! For the piano needs keys, springs and strings; the violin, a bow and stretched strings... and so through all the conventional instruments, which interpose some sort of mechanism between the music of the tone and the melody which you conceive in your head and heart! For the music leaps into being from the ends of your fingers... it is, as it were, an extension of yourself. It is vitally and literally your music, brought into being by your body itself. It may be music in its ultimate and greatest form... it certainly is music that will thrill you beyond words with its beauty, its power, its endless variety, its expressiveness and most of all with the consciousness that you yourself have created it! See... hear. play the RCA THEREMIN and know the keenest thrill of your life!"

The nearest thing to this is the Virtual Air Guitar, the spiritual heir of the Theremin, which "runs on a regular desktop computer... on a Linux computer, and all software used is free or open source."

Richard Hillesley

References

The Virtual Air Guitar
http://airguitar.tml.hut.fi/

The UK Air Guitar Championships
www.ukairguitar.com

The US Air Guitar Championships
www.airguitarusa.com