the.com/theremin
the only instrument you play by refusing to touch it, like a haunted air guitar.
means An early electronic musical instrument played by moving your hands near two antennas, which control pitch and volume without any physical contact, producing an eerie wavering tone.
from Named after its inventor, the Russian physicist Lev Sergeyevich Termen, whose name was Frenchified to Léon Theremin when he toured the West in the 1920s. He stumbled onto the effect while building equipment to measure the dielectric properties of gases — discovering that a hand near a circuit changed its pitch — and turned a lab quirk into the world's first instrument you play by haunting the air around it.
- invented
- 1920 by a Russian physicist studying proximity sensors
- how it works
- hands warp two electromagnetic fields between antennas
- spy roots
- inventor Theremin later built Soviet listening devices
- sound
- that wobbling wail in countless sci-fi films
- hardest skill
- pitch is invisible, played entirely from muscle memory
clara rockmore — russian-american virtuoso who defined the theremin as a concert instrument from 1920s-1990s
moog theremin — robert moog's 1998 redesign that became the most widely used modern theremin