Tag: Microtonal

The ‘Archifooon’ or ‘Archiphone’. Anton De Beer & Herman van der Horst. The Netherlands, 1970.

The Archiphone 1970
The Archiphone at the Huygens-Fokker Foundation. Amsterdam NL –

The Archiphone was essentially a portable electronic version of the giant ‘Fokker Organ’ – a thirty one tone microtonal pipe organ designed by the Dutch Physicist Adriaan Fokker in 1950.

The new electronic instrument was designed and built by Herman van der Horst of the firm Neonvox (based in Wilp, Gelderland, Netherlands) at the request of the organist, microtonal composer and Fokker-Organ virtuoso, Anton De Beer. Only four finished versions of the instrument are known to have been built they are located at: (1&2)  Huygens-Fokker Foundation, Amsterdam NL (3) William Bromhead Coates, 140 Station Street Blackheath NSW 2785 Australia, (4) Webster College St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

Microtonal composer Bill Coates playing the Archiphone
Microtonal composer Bill Coates playing the Archiphone

The unique aspect of the Archiphone was it’s microtonal keyboard design. The instrument was played on an unusual five octave, 333 note black (sharps), white (naturals), blue (semi-sharps), dark grey (flats) and grey(semi-flats) keyboard based on Huygens’s microtonal scale of 5th-tones (Christiaan Huygens, who, in 1661 rejected well-tempered tuning and first posited the 31-tone system). The sound was generated by transistor oscillators mount on removable printed circuit boards and controlled in the usual organ stop method; combinable  Pipe Organ, Piano, Woodwind, Flute, Trumpet, Strings and a series of mixable filters, vibrato and Bass/Treble settings controlled by manual sliders.

The Archiphone was housed in a 116 × 40 × 15 cm wooden lacquered box, Which, with an external 50 watt amplifier and speaker boxes allowed a certain amount of portability.

The Archiphone's 333 note Keyboard
The Archiphone’s 333 note Keyboard
Diagram showing part of the keyboard layout of the 31 tone Archiphone
Diagram showing part of the keyboard layout of the 31 tone Archiphone
Keyboard of the original Fokker Organ c 1952
Keyboard of the original Fokker Organ c 1952

A number of microtonal compositions have been written for the archiphone by artists such as Adriaan Fokker, Henk Badings, Anton de Beer, and Joel Mandelbaum. An instruction manual was written by Anton de Beer: ‘Guide for the use of the Archiphone’ (1976).

Adriaan Fokker
Adriaan Fokker

Adriaan Daniel Fokker. Born; Buitenzorg (now Bogor), Java, Indonesia 1887 Died; Haarlem NL 1972

Adriaan Fokker, cousin of the famous aviation pioneer Anthony Fokker, was educated in the Netherlands initially as a mining engineer at the Delft University of Technology, and later as a physicist at Leiden University. In Leiden he earned his doctorate in 1913. Fokker’s name is best known for the Fokker-Planck equation– a partial differential equation of second order, which describes the time evolution of the probability distribution of a physical variable subjected to a stochastic force, in addition to friction and possibly other driving forces (a prototypical example being Brownian motion). The Fokker-Planck equation was contained in Fokker’s thesis, and was independently derived by Max Planck.

During 1913-14 Fokker worked in Zürich as Albert Einstein’s assistant, and published an article in general relativity with Einstein as co-author. In 1923 Fokker was appointed professor of physics at Delft University of Technology.

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In 1940 The Netherlands was invaded by the German Army. To avoid having his skills as a physicist being used by the occupying Germans, Fokker turned to music theory – and in particular, tuning practice, microtonality and issues related to just intonation and the compromises embodied in equal temperament. His chief interests were the theories of Euler and Huygens. During the war, he constructed and had built a 12-key pipe organ with mean-tone tuning according to the principles of Euler’s ‘Generibus musicis’. Later, he had a 31-key organ built that realised an approximate pure tuned scale, based on Huygens’s microtonal scale of 5th-tones. Concerts involving the Fokker organ were given regularly since 1951. At the end of his life,  an electronic version, the ‘Archiphone’ was produced in 1970.

Anton De Beer. Born: 27 October 1924, Haarlem NL. Died: Haarlem, NL. 1 February 2000

De Beer playing the original Fokker Organ, Haarlem ,NL.
Anton De Beer playing the original Fokker Pipe Organ, Haarlem, NL.

Anton de Beer studied piano with Johannes Rontgen and Paul Frenckel, harpsichord with Richard Boer, and composition with Ernest W. Mulder. In 1951 he worked directly with Fokker and premiered 31-tone organ works by Badings, Kox, Joel Mandelbaum, Alan Ridout, and Wyschnegradsky. In 1970 at De Beers with Herman van der Horst of the firm “Neonvox” manufactured the Archiphone, an electronic portable version of Fokker’s larger pipe organ

Sources

http://www.huygens-fokker.org/instruments/instrumentshuygensfokker/archiphone.html
http://diapason.xentonic.org/cm/cm001.html

Click to access FokkerOrganRepertory.pdf

The Motorola Scalatron. Herman Pedtke & George Secor. USA, 1974

The Scalatron was an unusual microtonal electronic instrument developed in the early 1970s by Motorola as a new venture into the instrument market. Promoted as the ‘first instant-performance instrument that plays in the cracks’ the Scalatron was aimed squarely at a more experimental, microtonal market – if such a market existed. The instrument itself was a rather basic synthesiser consisting of 240 square wave oscillators (one for each key) built into a wooden home-organ casing. The instrument was manufactured in Chicago by Motorola for a brief period during the early 1970s (about 12 were constructed).

The original Scalatron had two five-octave manuals. Each note can be independently tuned and the tunings are selected and fixed before a performance begins; the frequency (about 3.5 MHz) of a master oscillator is divided by the operation of ten binary switches for each note, giving 1024 pitch possibilities per key, accurate to within less than half a cent. A second version, constructed in 1979-81 under the direction of Richard Harasek, features Secor’s design for the ‘Generalized Keyboard’, which has up to 56 notes per octave, controlled from 294 colour-coded oval keys (white naturals, red flats, black sharps). The keyboard can be electronically divided to provide two-manual effects. The system memory can store 17 switch-selected tunings. The Scalatron offers traditional organ sounds as well as synthesizer capabilities such as synthetic wave shapes, filters, and a white noise source. Outputs can be fed to a multi-track tape deck or to multiple channels for live performance. The Scalatron was used by Easley Blackwood at the University of Chicago in the late 1970s in the composition of his 12 Microtonal Etudes, each one of which explores an equal-tempered system having between 13 and 24 notes to the octave. Secor himself composed works in the 31-note system and in unequal temperaments using the Scalatron. A Scalatron electronic tuner was also marketed, in which stroboscopic patterns are aligned on a television screen.1Davies, Hugh. (2014) The Scalatron, The Grove dictionary of musical instruments, New York : Oxford University Press,418.

Scalatron with the
The Scalatron with a Secor Generalised Microtonal Keyboard

The instrument was controlled in early models by a dual manual and later using a multi-coloured ‘Bosanquet generalized keyboard’ designed by the Chicago microtonal composer George Secor.  The Secor keyboard consisted of 240 tuneable oval multicolored keys and allowed the user to create complex tunings

 “Earlier that year (1974) I had attended a demonstration of the Scalatron (digitally retunable electronic organ) prototype, and recognizing that conventional keyboards were not the best way to perform music with more than 12 tones in the octave, I unwittingly proceeded to re-invent the Bosanquet generalized keyboard and subsequently approached the Motorola Scalatron company with the proposal of employing it on their instrument.”… “Around that time several members of the xenharmonic movement had gotten in touch with Scalatron president Richard Harasek and sent him copies of the first two issues of Xenharmonikôn, which he passed on to me and which I promptly read. The second issue included Erv Wilson’s diagrams of a modification of Bosanquet’s keyboard, with hexagonal keys, at which point it became clear that my keyboard proposal was not new… For the remainder of the year I was heavily involved in the generalized (Bosanquet) keyboard Scalatron project and, after that, in using it to explore new tunings. In effect, the keyboard that I had discovered was destined to be overshadowed by the one that I had rediscovered.”

George Secor

Secor Keyboard
Secor Keyboard Diagram

George Secor demonstrates the Scalatron.2 Track Listing: 0:00 opening musical excerpt 1:47 spoken introduction 2:33 renaissance dance in Pythagorean tuning piece 3:46 explanation 3:57 baroque sonata improvisation in quarter-tone meantone 4:47 Individual harmonics with band-pass filter 5:40 explanation 5:54 played overtone series in 31-EDO 6:16 explanation 6:28 Improvisation in 31-EDO 8:48 explanation 8:58 Study on Olympics pentatonic by Harry Partch 10:11 explanation 10:44 31-EDO Improvisation with effects 15:12 explanation 16:04 Ivor Darreg 19-EDO Prelude 17:28 Explanation 17:42 “Chromatic Prelude” in 31-EDO by Adriaan Fokker | 18:24 Explanation 18:50 11-EDO 19:19 Explanation 19:27 Improvisation in 11-EDO 22:04 Improvisation 27:56 Explanation 28:29 Final Musical Piece

The Motorola Scalatron.

What would you expect of a keyboard made by a conglomerate television/communications/defense-systems manufacturer? Why, the Motorola Scalatron, of course. The ideas of geniuses often appear laughable in their own time, so we’ll allow that maybe the Scalatron was a brilliant invention. Maybe. But you’ve got to admit that, on the face of it, George Secor’s “generalized keyboard” (another variation on the Janko design) looks a tad loony. Take the designer’s own remarks on the subject: “Even if it were completely impractical musically, it would make a wonderful prop for a futuristic movie.” Or maybe for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Actually, Secor’s generalized-keyboard Scalatron was an extension of the original instrument built by Motorola engineers Don Ryon and the late Dick Harasek, with help from now-retired DePaul University Professor Herman Pedtke, to play nontempered tunings. Their Scalatron had a standard black-and-white keyboard, but Secor’s multicolored arrangement of 240 push-button keys was adopted to make the instrument’s variable-tuning hardware practical with virtually any microtonal scale. The designer himself (a specialist in microtonal theory and musical temperament) toured with it, performing the works of Harry Partch and Ben Johnston. Of course, any technology has its limits. “There is not much point,” Secor writes, “in using this alternative keyboard for systems below 31 tones in the octave.” If you’re into playing standards, don’t bother looking for this baby on the used market. Two Secor-style Scalatrons were built — compared to about 12 with the standard keyboard — in the few years after the instrument’s introduction in 1974.

While Secor mentioned in a 1976 newsletter that “the synthesizer functions of the Scalatron seem to have been almost as important as the keyboard in putting the instrument over,” those functions look a little rudimentary even by contemporary standards, especially for a $6,500 machine. The square-wave oscillators, one for each note, were kept in tune by a reference frequency gener-ated by Motorola’s television technology. From there the waveforms were subjected to filtering and attack/release envelope control. Seven userdefinable tuning programs were provided at an additional cost of about $1,000. “I use mine all the time,” says Professor Easley Blackwood of the University of Chicago, “but only for research.” Blackwood still keeps a standard-keyboard Scalatron in his office. “It’s on the fritz now, but I’ll be getting it fixed soon. It has rock-steady tuning capabilities; you can always count on it to be right. But I would never consider it for live performance.”

Mark Vail, Keyboard presents Vintage synthesizer 1993. 3Vail, Mark.(1993)Keyboard presents Vintage synthesizers : ground breaking instruments and pioneering designers of electronic music synthesizers, San Francisco : GPI Books ; Emeryville, CA, 91-2.

Costing around  $6000-$10,000, the Scalatron was an expensive and unusual instrument. Less than 20 Scalatrons were ever made (including only 2 Secor versions). The Scalatron came with a black and white monitor to adjust each key’s pitch (using Motorola’s TV tuning technology) – a split screen showed horizontal bars representing  true pitch on the left side and the instruments variable pitch on the right side, and, for an additional $1000  a cassette interface was added with a number of tuning ‘programmes’. George Secor toured with the instrument playing works by Harry Partch (who also used the instrument towards the end of his life: “It’s just what I needed, 40 years too late.” 4 Burt, Warren. My History With Music Tech, http://www.warrenburt.com/my-history-with-music-tech2/, retrieved 16/04/24.  ) and Ben Johnston.  The Scalatron is still much in favour – though very hard to find – by microtonal composers and was used on several albums by Jon Hassell, most notably for the drone parts in ‘Vernal Equinox’ 1977.

A dual manual Scalatron at La Trobe University Melbourne
A dual manual Scalatron at La Trobe University Melbourne 1976. Each key can be tuned to one of 1024 different pitches. Image Warren Burt, My History With Music Tech.

scalatron_02 scalatron_01

Sources:

  • 1
    Davies, Hugh. (2014) The Scalatron, The Grove dictionary of musical instruments, New York : Oxford University Press,418. ↩︎
  • 2
    Track Listing: 0:00 opening musical excerpt 1:47 spoken introduction 2:33 renaissance dance in Pythagorean tuning piece 3:46 explanation 3:57 baroque sonata improvisation in quarter-tone meantone 4:47 Individual harmonics with band-pass filter 5:40 explanation 5:54 played overtone series in 31-EDO 6:16 explanation 6:28 Improvisation in 31-EDO 8:48 explanation 8:58 Study on Olympics pentatonic by Harry Partch 10:11 explanation 10:44 31-EDO Improvisation with effects 15:12 explanation 16:04 Ivor Darreg 19-EDO Prelude 17:28 Explanation 17:42 “Chromatic Prelude” in 31-EDO by Adriaan Fokker | 18:24 Explanation 18:50 11-EDO 19:19 Explanation 19:27 Improvisation in 11-EDO 22:04 Improvisation 27:56 Explanation 28:29 Final Musical Piece ↩︎
  • 3
    Vail, Mark.(1993)Keyboard presents Vintage synthesizers : ground breaking instruments and pioneering designers of electronic music synthesizers, San Francisco : GPI Books ; Emeryville, CA, 91-2. ↩︎
  • 4
    Burt, Warren. My History With Music Tech, http://www.warrenburt.com/my-history-with-music-tech2/, retrieved 16/04/24.  ↩︎