Ondioline
The ondioline is a monophonic , tube- based keyboard instrument. It consists of an oscillator and a small three-octave keyboard . The keyboard instrument is considered to be the forerunner of today's synthesizer .
With the Ondioline, complex sounds can be generated using several filters and further changed manually. The volume is controlled with a knee lever. A special feature of the Ondioline is the vibrato effect controlled by the suspended, movable keyboard .
history
The first Ondioline was designed by Georges Jenny during his tuberculosis treatment in 1938 and was produced and developed in his company Les Ondes Georges Jenny (later known as La Musique Electronique ) in Paris until his death in 1976 . The instruments were built by Jenny herself or sold as a kit. In the US alone , over 1,000 ondiolins were ultimately sold. In order to keep production costs as low as possible and to be able to sell the instruments for around 400 dollars, components of inferior quality were often used, whereupon the devices had to be permanently serviced or were no longer usable after a few years.
The ondioline became particularly popular in Europe, where it was often used for film music as well as in the theater and in cabarets. In Germany it was marketed under the name Pianoline and in the Netherlands as Orcheline . The instrument gained further fame at the 1958 World Exhibition in Brussels . There the ondioline was played on the Atomium .
The musician Jean-Jacques Perrey in particular achieved great success as a demonstrator of the ondioline and is therefore considered a pioneer of electronic music .
