After spending over a year and a half perfecting various electronic designs for theremins, I decided that it was time to see how my latest version worked "in the field." The field, in this case, being a friend's living room which was equipped with a reasonably good stereo amplifier and speakers. In my modest development lab, all I had was a cheap pair of headphones which served me well during the design phase, but which I left behind during the field trial, thinking that the stereo would work as well, if not better. It was then that I learned the value of headphones with respect to playing the theremin. (Author's Note: My subsequent understanding of headphones considerably changed my opinion regarding their use. I do not recommend them.)
Apparently, intimate acoustic coupling between the theremin's output and the player's ears is quite important in playing the instrument, a feature provided by headphones, but not always with monitors. I heard a comment about the presence of a large loudspeaker which Clara Rockmore placed immediately behind her while performing theremin concerts, reportedly so that she could make minor pitch corrections at an unobtrusive volume, prior to emphasizing a note. My experience suggests a direct parallel with her speaker and my headphones; such acute awareness of the theremin's output seems quite essential for accurate control. I therefore decided that the best approach for a practical instrument would be to include a headphone jack and volume control and perhaps even a three-band equalizer to flatten the headphone response and allow the operator to adjust the frequency emphasis according to his or her preference. A further embellishment may be to include an input jack and mix control so that accompanying instruments may be monitored as well. I think this would work well in an ensemble.
I spent some time wondering why the headphones seemed so necessary, and concluded that since the theremin is totally non-tactile, one must mainly rely on the ears for control. The theremin is very difficult to play in an environment where there are unrelated sounds to mask and distract the player, and I noticed that my control over the instrument seemed especially poor even with minor noises such as the sound from the furnace fan. Hopefully, my ability to control the instrument in the presence of ambient noise will improve with practice.
I took the theremin back to the lab, spent a few days making some circuit refinements, and hooked it up to a cassette recorder via a Yamaha DRV3000 digital reverb, selecting a single-effect 250 millisecond echo patch with a 25 percent process/ 75 percent dry mix. I recorded a few minutes and then listened to what I had, which was nothing very good! Observation number two: improvisational playing is one thing, a recognizable rendition is something much more difficult to achieve. In fact, I felt a little disappointed because I had worked so hard in making a quality instrument which I couldn't seem to play very well. My improvisational passages were more agreeable than my attempts at standards, and if my experiences are common among others who play the theremin, such limitation may explain why the instrument is usually used for accenting compositions, as opposed to providing a central melodic feature. (It seems that the number living concert theremin players can be counted on one hand.)
As to the application of reverberation and other effects, these seem to impede accurate pitch control. I concluded that recorded passages should be made "dry" and that, if desired, effects be added during editing.
Arthur Harrison
22 February 1996
©1996 by Arthur Harrison