Authors

Discussion

This paper contextualizes the projects of the Soviet physicist and musician Leon Theremin (1896-1993), known for his invention of the theremin, originally known as the termenvox, or golos Termena – an electronic musical instrument responding to hand movements within an electromagnetic field. An extraordinarily versatile tonal range of this early electronic instrument evoked associations with the operatic soprano, although the instrument’s critics in the 1920s were perplexed by its propensity to “slide into notes” and never pause to take a breath. This difference between a strange technogenic sound and tonalities, approximating human voice and air instruments, was explored in Theremin’s stage concerts. While touring Europe’s most prestigious concert halls, such as the Albert Hall in London and the Salle Gaveau in Paris in 1929, the inventor dramatized the transformation of the electronic tone into a “warmer,” more “life-like” sound by introducing the vibrato technique into his hand movements. Further, in his writings in the 1960s and 1970s, he reflected on the ways in which his experimental musical instruments from the 1920s-1930s expanded the range of the audience’s sensory experience (for example, evoking vague feelings of anxiety through infrasound or simulating sensations of vertigo through clever combinations of moving color-and-light projections in sync with the electronic music). In the 1920s-1930s, Theremin pursued his ambitions to stage “synthetic super-concerts,” where electro-magnetic vibrations generated by the performer’s movements would transmit not only acoustic sensations, but also trigger devices inducing visual, haptic, and olfactory senses of the audience. In the 1960s, Theremin described his attempts to convert the electric currents (biotok) of his own body into sound. My research situates these experiments within the scientific trends of early Soviet techno-utopianism, underscoring the institutional and political contexts of Theremin’s inventions. I further consider Theremin’s instruments as a form of sensory prostheses, or symbiotic cyborg-like assemblages, foregrounding the implications of his experiments for contemporary debates in media theory, which are concerned, after Friedrich Kittler, with technological processes that happen beyond the threshold of human sensory perception.