"A Scanner Darkly"

I am pining away at the lack of theremins in the soundtrack but I'll bet I wooden be board listening to it.

Even though I think it was a mis-teak, I won't act like and ash and birch about it and I certainly won't com-plane.

After all, it walnut change anything now wood it!

I'm going to cedar film as soon as I can. I think it will be quite poplar.

Surely theremins are synthesisers, since they create their sounds without an acoustic source? Certainly most modern theremins actually use 'subtractive synthesis' too, since filters are used to cut out unwanted sharpness or brightness in order to 'synthesise' a more pleasant tone.

The waveform itself is heterodyned, which I believe is a form of additive synthesis.

I've often heard PP refer to the 91a as a 'synthesiser' rather than a theremin, but why isn't a theremin considered a synthesiser?

Charlie,

I guess that's your way of saying "Enough with the puns already!"

Hint taken.

I think the main reason theremins are not called synths it just beause we have this paradigm of what a synthesizer is.

When the theremin was invented there were no synthesizers so nobody called it that.

By the time synths as we know them came into being the theemin was already well establish as the theremin.

I'm glad we got that hammered out.

I think I nailed it pretty well....

I'm amused that it's described here as a saw sounding like a theremin, since leon theremin said he wanted the theremin to sound like a saw. My, how times have changed.

Oh, and Rupert wrote "the 'catch' is nothing that hasn't been obvious to anyone with a three digit IQ since the 1980s"... I feel I should point out that it was written in the 70's.

Indeed. My father offered to make my daughter a mobile to hang in the hallway. She asked why you would hang a phone.

Charlie. Source not acoustic?

Correctly, the circuit diagram for an active theremin should include the player, yes?

OK. As well as being a mobile capacitor plate or two, the player also provides the decision making part of what is, literally, a cybernetic organism: part organic, part machine. So the player, and in particular the decisions he makes are the source of the music being played. Of course, like any self respecting cyborg, a feedback loop is involved, specifically from the loudspeaker to the ear and this acoustic information informs the decision making process.

Source acoustic.

:-)

Hah. Why on earth are they called mobiles anyway?!

I think you misunderstand my use of the word acoustic Gordon. Of course all instruments can be described as 'acoustic' technically since you can hear them (from 'Akuw' - 'I hear' in Ancient Greek).

In this sense however it implies that the theremin uses electricity to produce or enhance its sound. The theremin is neither an acoustic nor electro-acoustic instrument. It is electronic. The theremin itself isn't vibrating to make the sound, neither is the air within it. The electric amplifier does everything.

Acoustic:

Music.

1. Of or being an instrument that does not produce or enhance sound electronically: an acoustic guitar; an acoustic bass.

Mobile - a contraction from the phrase "moon-bile charm".

Originally it was a fetish or magical object intended to ward off the negative effects of pre-menstrual tension, the menstrual cycle being, as the name implies, linked to the phases of the moon, and the associated irascibility or choleric disposition being caused by an imbalance of the humours, specifically yellow bile.

Or it might be that mobiles were invented by the Dadaist sculptor Alexander Calder in the 1930s, and named as such by the rather better known Dadaist Marcel Duchamp because they move around in the slightest breeze, and are therefore "mobile" (from the Latin mobilis - to move.)

Oh yeah. . . silly me.

Either explanation for "mobile" sounds plausible.

As far as the player being part of the instrument, players are always part of the deicison making process.

What makes our instrument unique is that the player is part of the circuit itself.