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Harald in the meantime had finished postgraduate studies at the Institute for Oscillation Research, the former Heinrich Hertz Institute and worked as a developing engineer in various fields of electronics. 2 Like the Warbo Formant Organ it was created out of Harald’s own initiative, alongside daytime jobs. The Melodium was a monophonic, touch-sensitive keyboard instrument, a melody instrument that produced a broad variety of timbres. See also Tom Rhea’s article on the Warbo Formant Organ in ✼ontemporary Keyboard Magazine«, 1979: » Harald Bode’s Four-Voice Assignment Keyboard (1937)« The earliest known recordings of Harald’s instruments are with the Melodium, which followed up the Warbo Formant around three years later.ġ. No recording of the Warbo Formant has been found to date. The institute was destroyed during the war and so was the Warbo Formant Organ. A review of the presentation concluded with, ✻ode’s talent seems big and promising enough, to demand from him further steps towards that aim.« Two versions of the instruments were made and later brought to the Institute for High Frequency Technology at the University of Hanover, where Oskar Vierling and Fritz Sennheiser, later founder of the Sennheiser company, were professors. The thought was that this kind of instruments could be successful, if composers could be found willing to use the opportunities of new, original sounds instead of imitating known instrumental sounds. In September 1937, the Warbo Formant Organ was presented to the public in a cinema and in November in a matinée style event at an artist’s studio.
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The construction also allowed a unique way of sound creation. What Harald implemented for the very first time was polyphony with dramatically fewer tubes than were necessary in other instruments. That was unusual as polyphony in electronic instruments was not as easy to implement as today. With the Warbo Formant Organ four notes could be played at a time. After Harald had proven the instrument’s feasibility with a breadboard model using doorbell buttons as keys, Mr. How should he get the means? At a lecture he held on his Steinway-Hiller piano development he found Christian Warnke, a violinist with a strong interest in those new means of musicality. When Harald decided to build something that he would call an electronic organ, he was, in relation to financial support, in the middle of nowhere. Trautonium and Hellertion had been developed in academic circumstances and development of the Sphaerophon and its predecessors had been widely supported by government, private sponsors and the big electronics company, Telefunken. Ondes Martenot in France had a wide support by music academies and contemporary composers, and the Sphaerophon, Trautonium and Hellertion were known to a certain extent in Germany. Only Hammond had made a commercially successful instrument in America. A few electronic instruments here and there existed, making more press as a curiosity than being heard by a broader audience. The term synthesizer though was not around yet. The sounds could be created freely from different parameters by using half-rotary and stop knobs. Following that principle, Harald planned his first instrument, which would have in fact the capabilities of a synthesizer, as he himself and Dr. The physicists Herrmann and Trautwein had, in the 1920s and early 30s, examined 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, the sound colour, or timbre of sound. There was a demand for new sound colours, Klangfarben, by composers that had been written about in Germany as early as 1888. 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 radios and many other electric devices. Harald got knowledge of this and improved it. One of these was the Steinway-Hiller Grand Piano (which was patented but never went into production). At this time grand pianos with pickups to transfer the vibrations of the strings into electric waves were developed already. Recording technology was not very advanced at this time, so Harald got in touch with the problem of recording a grand piano properly. 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.