Electronic Musical Instrument 1870

The lyricon was a wind/breath controlled analogue synthesiser developed during the 1970s by Computone Inc in the USA. The Lyricon was designed to enable wind instrumentalists control of a synthesiser by playing a type of electronic saxaphone and to imitate wind instrument sounds. The instruments was contained in a fur-lined palstic case housing the synthesiser, the synthesiser used a form of additive synthesis allowing the player to key in the types of overtones required with a key switchable fundamental of G, Bb, C, Eb or F and a range switch of low, medium or high.The instrument also had glissando, portmento and "timbre attack" (a type of chorusing)

Two further models of the Lyricon were developed, the "Wind Synthesizer Driver" which had the ability to add expression from lip pressure as well as VCA and VCF control through the wind control outputs, and the "Lyricon II" a 2 oscillator synthesiser with a re-modelled wind controller- the synthesiser having square/sawtooth wave shapes a VCF and LFO, the envelope being controlled by the lip pressure. The "Wind Synthesizer Driver" & the "Lyricon II" had the ability to control external synthesisers.

All of the Lyricons used the same saxophone style fingering system, with two octave keys above the left-hand thumb rest. The Wind Synthesizer Driver also had a transposition footswitch feature, where a foot pedal could be used to transpose the entire range up or down one octave. With the Lyricon II this was done from the control panel. The Lyricons used a bass clarinet mouthpiece, with a sensor on the reed to detect pressure. There was a diaphragm which moved and changed the light output from a LED which was in turn sensed by a photocell to give dynamic control.

There were additionally some models put out just as the mouthpiece unit, and they were used to control keyboard synths, much as a breath control unit works on a Yamaha keyboard currently. This occurred just as the company went out of business. Just before it went out of business in the early 80's, the Selmer band instrument company took over distribution, but was unable to market the instrument successfully. The Lyricon became the development model for the EVS and later Yamaha's EWI wind synthesisers.

Other wind controllers developed after the Lyricon were the Casio DH series, the Artisyn SX01 MIDI Sax, the Perkiphone MIDI acoustic trumpet , the Suzuki MIDI Recorder SRW-100, the Stynthophone and others.