Around 1935 Harald Bode, an educated physicist at the age of 26, with a strong musical background, his father was an organ player and teacher, his mother played harpsichord, started a recording business in his hometown Hamburg, Germany with a microphone and a recording device. Recording technology was not very advanced at this time, so Harald got in touch with the problem of recording a grand piano properly. At this time grand pianos with pickups to transfer the vibrations of the strings into electric waves were developed already. One of these was the Steinway-Hiller-Piano. Harald got knowledge of this and improved it. But he had in mind to build an instrument which would produce musical sounds completely out of electronics, using vacuum tubes, which at that time were the state of the art basic technology for radio and many other electric devices. There was a demand for new sound colours, “Klangfarben” by composers that had been written about in Germany as early as 1888. The physicists Herrmann and Trautwein had examined in the twenties and early thirties the characteristics of human voice, and through that found out, that all musical sounds were based on the same principle: the formants and the hall formants, groups of overtones with higher intensity than other overtones formed the “Klangfarbe”, sound colour, timbre of sound. Following that principle Harald planned his first instrument, which would have in fact the capabilities of a synthesizer, The sounds could be created freely from different parameters by using half-rotary and stop knobs. In September 1937, the Warbo Formant Organ was presented to the public in a cinema and in November in a matinee style event at an artist´s studio. The earliest known recordings of Harald’s instruments are with the Melodium, which followed up the Warbo Formant around three years later. A good thing like the Melochord could be improved or modified for other uses. Harald, after the success of the Melochord, which was a two-voice instrument, decided to offer a further development to Bayerischer Rundfunk München, where his Melochord had first been presented and was still in extensive use. It needed high skills to operate, which were provided quite often by Harald himself. The new instrument would be polyphonic, many notes could be played at the same time, thus enabling the playing of chords. So the name was easily found, the Polychord. The Bayerischer Rundfunk, Southern German Radio, agreed to commission this instrument and so he built it. Throughout 1950, the Polychord was presented on air by him and Fekko v. Ompteda.
excerpt from the essay “Harald Bode, A Liftime for Sound” by Caspar Abocab
credits
released December 29, 2018
Carrier Band: Peer Bode · Andrew Deutsch · Rebekkah Palov · Harald Bode. With: Caspar Abocab · Don Metz · Tom Kostusiack · Tomas Henriques - COVER EMIL SHULT - DESIGN - DEUTSCH
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