How Theremins Work

one nomination. You nominate one game, and you need to tell us the name of the game and the platform it was on. And it could be any platform. It could be an arcade game, it could be a PC, Mac, Xbox, PS three, Nintendo handheld console. It can be web based if you like. But just you let us know what the platform is so we can make sure we count

that as the votes. So you can nominate your game either through email, which is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can nominate through Twitter or Facebook. And we're gonna put a cut off date on this. I want to have the episode go up by the

end of September of eleven. So let's say you need to get your nominations in by September eleven, So if you get those nominations into us, we will make sure we include those in the process, and we will have an episode where we give you the worst video games of all time based upon the votes of our listeners. Thanks a lot. Can't wait to hear from you. Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff

works dot com. Hello, everyone, Welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Poet, and I am an editor at how stuff works dot com. Sitting across from me, as always, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. How about the power to kill a yak from two hundred yards away with mind bullets? That's telekinesis Kyle. That is a first. We have never quoted them before. I probably shouldn't have just then, but I'm gonna do it anyway. And there's a reason why I quoted that, but we'll get into that first. Let's

get into why we're going to do this episode. This comes to us courtesy of a Google Plus suggestion. This suggestion comes to us from Mary who, and I'm gonna truncate her message a bit because she actually had quite a long with lots of different suggestions, but starts off with you may be interested to know. I, for one, I'm not tech savvy, at least compared to the crowd of early adopter types here on Google Plus. I'm a

rhetoric major. Should have graduated when I was twenty, but in one class short of might be a for financial slash academic red tape reasons with miners in French and German guten tag. Mary. Aside from being a pro vocalist, my real job is teaching English to disadvantaged and academically

struggling eighth graders, which is amazing. I also t aid college level rhet comp to and have private students tutoring clients, mostly college students, some high school, a few middle school primarily seeing me for writing instruction or literary interpretation analysis and historical analysis with embusses on reading comprehension. Apparently I

need to take that at any rate. Mary then goes on to give several suggestions, the last of which is finally, more music stuff for those of us who missed the B side. R I P programs like able to end pro tools, HD electronics like dB Thereman, and the very awesome react table you can see on YouTube worthy of its own podcast. While all of that is true. We are going to do a Theoreman podcast, and I know

that stuff from the Beast. I did one as well, but we're really gonna dive down and talk about with Thereman. It's history, how it works, uh, and you know the what's the basis behind It's pretty interesting stuff. And as I said, the song I quoted at the beginning actually does feature a thereman. Oh so and and uh, just to help people who want to learn more about some of the stuff we're talking about today on how stuff works. We don't have how Thereman's work yet, although I do

believe it's actually gone out as an assignment. We do have how amplifiers work, and that's going to be a very important part of our conversation at some point. We do have an article on the Thereman however, Yes, we do have articles on the Thereman, just not one that specifically breaks down how it works. Yet. Like I said, I think by the time this podcast goes live, we me that may have changed. But I know that there is an assignment out there somewhere, floating out in the ether.

It's not me. I'm not the one writing it so or at least it hasn't been assigned to me. Let's let's start talking about the history here. You wanted to, uh talk about our buddy Leo Leon Thereman actually Lev Sergeyevitch, who was a scientist and inventor. UM. I got a little information about Mr Thereman from Britannica, always a good source for the biographical on these inventors. Um. He lived

in uh in St. Petersburg and uh Florida, Russia. He was well, he was born there in and died in in Moscow, Florida, No, North Dakota, uh in nineteen I wonder if there is a Moscow anyway. UM. So, yeah, it's funny that you would say out of the ether because the original name for this device was the ether a phone, but it was later renamed to be the Thereman, and uh, basically it's it's known for the way you

play it. Unlike pretty much every other kind of instrument I can think of where you actually need to touch it to do this, the Thereman you specifically do not touch. UM. I knew a lot of people who have that same policy. But yes, no, you're you're that's absolutely correct. Therriman has played without touching it, yep, and he actually played it for for Lenin in nineteen twenty two and and for Albert Einstein in and UM patented the instrument in in New York. UM and then he went into a lot

of other stuff. He uh tried to work on other musical instruments and UH worked on an electronic security system for prisons. UM ended up in a Siberian labor camp in the Soviet Union. Certainly not yeah, Uh he was. He did work did some work for a in a military lab during World War Two where he was working on UH naval tracking systems and remote controls UM and even on spy technology and eavesdropping device for the KGB. Uh. He he got the Stalin Prize for that. UM. Smart

guy is what we're talking about here. Yeah. Yeah, he became a professor of acoustics at the Moscow Conservatory. UM and UH, you know, had done a lot of a lot of different kinds of electronics work. So certainly, UH a very interesting person. But you know, I think he's probably best known. I don't think anyone argue that he's

best known for the ether phone, I mean the Thereman. Yeah, since it does, since it does actually bear his name, or at least the Western version of his name, and before we go any further, I think it might might behoove us to to have a little a little listen to to what a thereman sounds like. So this is

the sound of the theoreman. Now, listeners may have recognized that from various songs, and really, I think, I think what that always reminds me of is all all those like nineteen fifties science fiction films and TV series that either used a thereman or use some sort of other effect to create a thereman like sound as part of the soundtrack. Because not everything that that sounds like a

thereman is in fact a thereman. In fact, one of the most famous songs that people tend to say had a thereman and it did not is Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys. Almost said Beastie Boys. This is that's I haven't had enough coffee. Good Vibrations by the Beastie Boys, And that would have been hilarious and wrong. But anyway, yeah, that's not that's not a theoreman used in that song.

It's a it's a totally different instrument. Actually, it's called tannerin although I mean it does it does have a similar sound to it, but you actually do play that by touching you slide your finger on it, and depending on where you're touching it, it it you know, produces a different sound. And if you were to look at a theorem and you would immediately see that the I guess the most notable feature is that it's you know, depending upon the design of it, it's gonna look like some

sort of a box. But from that box, you're going to see a pair of antenna and one Traditionally, one antenna is vertical aligned to the box, so it's it's up and down, and then a second antenna seems to is to come out the side of the box. It's horizontal and it's in a loop. And using your hands moving them close to and further away those antenna that's

what controls the sound that comes out of the theoreman. Yeah, you uh, you know, it's always good to adjust it a little bit to the left, you know, get the get the picture just right right. Oh wait, I'm sorry, I was thinking of a different kind of antenna. Yeah, no, it's yeah, it's not a rabbit ears um. Yeah. In fact, that's a good point. We should mention that this is these antenna are not designed to pick up any sort of radio frequency. That's not the purpose of the antenna.

We'll get into that when we start getting into the actual, uh ways that the the theoreman works. So do you said you wanted to talk a little bit at one point about songs that you may have heard or perhaps even other ways that you may have heard a thereman. Well, yeah, I mean I was an early subscriber to XM Radio, the satellite radio service here in the United States, and they used to have a channel called Special X where they would play all kinds of strange and unusual things.

And they actually had, believe it or not, a whole show devoted to music from the Theoreman. And so they were all these and again you're right, period records from like the fifties and stuff where there were uh, you know, thereman songs that they were playing entire pieces on the theorem. And and actually you could find a lot of the stuff on on YouTube. I've seen people, I've seen theremin orchestras, wow, where there are different people playing songs and they have

different parts. So everybody's got a different purpose of doing it, and it's it sounds kind of random when you just hear these sections and segments and other songs and pop songs and things like that. But you you know, people you can actually play this as a musical instrument. And so I've I've heard a lot of that kind of stuff. Um,

I'm trying to think of something specific. You have a favorite thereman song other than the one that you quoted before, other than the one I quoted before, and not really um, but there are other songs that have used it. They are actually uh, like I said, it's for me. The thing that I think about are all those those like The Day the Earth Stood Still, That would be a

famous film that used a thereman as a sound effect. Uh. There there was a theremin used at least in some versions of the theme to Star Trek, although most of the time that was actually a vocalist who did that effect. But I believe in in one or two versions of

that you can hear a theremin being used. Um. So, I mean there are bands that experiment and they'll throw that in the mix, and it may even be that it's it's a minor part of the song where you know, it's not meant to take the forefront of the melody or anything like that. It's just another another layer of complexity within a song itself. Uh So I guess we can now talk about what a theoreman does, like how

does it make that sound? Like why is it that when you put your hand closer to or further away from one intend it changes the pitch and the other one controls the volume. That's by the way, the vertical one is the pitch antenna and the horizontal one is the volume antenna. Awesome, Actually it's uh it's funny because uh, typically you think of making music with an instrument as

you wanted to sound as clear as possible. Um, But in the opportunity to play a thereman, you'll realize that, uh, it's actually all about creating interference because these uh, these antennae um actually have an electromagnetic field that and you're interfering with that by coming closer and moving farther away to different degrees. So really what's what you're hearing is the sound of the interference with the machine. Yeah, it's

actually to to dive down into this. The way this works is that you've got coils of wire inside the theorem and that are generating electromagnetic field and that is propagated along the antenna and so with the case of the pitch antenna, you have two different um UH like

two different oscillators creating this electromagnetic field. One of them is a steady frequency, the other one's variable frequency, and the variable frequency all depends upon your hand coming into contact with or not contact but coming closer or or moving further away from the pitch antenna. UH. What will happen then is that the frequencies from these two different UH oscillators will mix. And this is a process that we call heterodyning. And heterodyning is you you process these

these signals and you take UH. Typically you can get lots of different um um results from combining signals, but typically you look at the sum and the difference and UH you choose, you filter one out and you focus on the other. And in this case, we're talking about the difference because the the frequencies that are generated by these oscillators are too high for human here. But the

difference is not um. So if you are creating a variation in one frequency and the other frequency is remaining constant UH, when you take the difference of that and you take that signal, that signal is then within the range of human hearing, and because you've got that one variable frequency, you can change the pitch. So and it all has to do with, of course, the capacitance that we have. You know, human beings, we have a capacitance, and uh it's really most mostly based on body mass.

So um, there's another interesting point is that if you have two different people playing the same theraman, they're going to quickly find out like to let's say, take one tiny little person and one huge person. So you've got ham hands and you've got little dainty fingers. Little dainty fingers comes up there and starts playing with theraman and realizes that when they when their dainty fingers get within a certain distance of the antenna, a particular pitch is played.

Then ham hands comes up and starts to play, and then realizes very quickly that it's a different distance for ham hands to get to that intended to make that same pitch. And it has to do with the mass of the of of ham hands. So uh, you know, it's two people playing the same thereman are going to find out that they can't mimic one another's motions and get the exact same sound. It's going to be different based upon the actual size of the musician and all. Like I said, that all has to do with the

capacitance that we as humans actually have ourselves. So we interfere with that electromagnetic field. The frequencies combine in the heterodyning process as I've said, as I mentioned, we filter out the sum. We take the difference of those two frequencies, UH, and that signal is what creates the pitch. Now, even though it's within the range of human hearing, UH, you can't really hear it very well unless you put it through an amplification process, which we'll have to talk about

in a second. And the second antenna, the volume antenna, really just has the one oscillator and then there's a steady UH voltage being applied further in. And what happens is when you move your hand closer to that antenna, you are interrupting the first the signal from the first oscillator, that electromagnetic field. And as you interrupt that electromanetic magnetic field, the signal becomes weaker, which ends up being a control

on the volume. So, in other words, the closer your hand gets to that second antenna, the quieter the sound will be. You might think that you know, you would want to get your hand closer to make the sound go up, but it's exactly the opposite. So if you put your hand close to the antenna, the sound is going to be very low. And as you take your hand away from that antenna, the horizontal antenna, the volume increases, so the pitch will remain the same, assuming that your

other hand is is steady. And and also I should mention when you watch people play the theremin, especially people who have just started to play, you might notice them moving their hands up and down the the length of the vertical antenna. That really doesn't have much of an effect. It can change the pitch a little bit, but the real change and pitch has to do with the distance

from the antenna. So you can keep your hands steady at the same level respective to the vertical antenna and just change the the distance your hand is from that antenna, and that would change the pitch. You don't have to move your hand up and down the length of the antenna in order to change it, because you really need

both hands to operate them. Well, yeah, because you have to, I mean, because otherwise you would just have a steady volume time, right, So you need you need to be able to uh, you know, have both hands free to operate the Theoreman's you know, both the pitch and the volume. Um. And you know, I think it can also depend not only on the person, but on the instrument itself. So sure, yeah you can. You can actually tune a thereman as well.

And that that all has to do with the electronics that are inside the thereman, because depending upon the electronic components you've put in there and the the frequency difference between the variable frequency and the steady frequency, uh, you you will have a certain octave range that that thereman is capable of playing and uh and sometimes that octave range can be quite uh large, very large range. But that means that you have to have even more control

when you're playing it. Uh, that that tiny changes in the distance between your hand and the antenna will result in fairly significant changes in pitch. Which is why the thereman is one of those instruments that's you know, you can step right up and start playing it uh and have fun making weird noises, but if you want to be able to actually play a tune with with regularity, it takes a lot of practice. It's one of those

really difficult to masterpieces. And uh actually have a list of some of the components that are in a typical thereman, if you would like to hear. Sure. Okay, so we've got the two antenna. As I mentioned before, the the volume antenna is actually a loop. It looks like a semicircle that's attached to the horizontal side, one of the

horizontal sides of the theraman itself. There. The reason for that design is that the old thermans were all based on vacuum tube technology, is before solid state technology was really a thing at all. The first Theraman and so um. In order to be able to make this antenna and have it fit with the old system, you actually had to create this loop so that you had the right antenna length without interfering with the other electronic components of

the device. So even though we've reached a point now where most modern theramans still use vacuum tubes at least in some capacity, and we'll talk about that a little bit, hey, But Chris, I'm sure we'll have something to say about using vacuum tubes as opposed to solid state. Being the musician, you would you would know more about this than I do.

But in general has to do with sound quality. So there are still vacuum tubes used in most modern theramins, but they also involve some solid state electronic components now, which means that you no longer would have to do that loop UH to achieve the same effect. But I think a lot of a lot of theramin designers like to use it anyway, just kind of as a throwback to the original theoreman So it's almost like it's almost

like a traditional thing at this point. UM. So inside the theremin, you're going to find typically a pair of chassis. One chassis is gonna be for your electromagnetic components, and this is where this is what generates that electromagnetic field for both of the antenna UM. You would normally find three oscillators in there. You would find two oscillators for

the pitch, one oscillator for the volume UH. The this chassis often called an upper chassis, and a lot of the theramans I've looked at UH is has to be separated from the other chassis which has the amplification and power UH elements to it, because otherwise the electromagnetic field would interfere with the operation of those elements. All right, So the lower chassis where you get the power coming

into the device. Uh, and you have the amplification oscillators and usually we use triodes and that you probably have heard of diodes. Diodes, of course, are those electronic components that allow electrons to pass through one way but not back yet. It's a one way lane. It allows electron uh flow in one direction only. Triads are a little different. Triads are well, it's a kind of vacuum tube and and from a superficial level, they resemble a light bulb.

And the way a triode works is that there are typically three elements within a triode, which makes sense when you hear the name. You've got the cathode, which is the part of the triad that that will shed electrons. You've got a grid of some sort that will control the flow of electrons. It kind of acts as like a gate in a way. Then you have the anode, which is where the electrons want to get too, because it has a positive charge. Now remember electrons have a

negative charge, so negative wants to be attracted. It is attracted to positive. So you have a positive element on one side, a negative element on another side, and a gate in the middle to control the flow. And that's the basis behind um the triode. Now, in order to control the flow of electrons, what you have to do is you hook up that gate to a source of electricity. All right. Now, if you're generating electricity and you're you're putting a current through that gate, that means you're putting

negative electrons through the gate. Now that's gonna repel the electrons coming out of the cathode. All right, So you've got the cathode. Let's imagine that the cathodes on the left hand side, and in the middle is this gate that has electrons running through it, and on the right you have the anode. Now, the the current that you're putting through that gate is going to vary because that's

your input. That's that's the signal that's going into like when you're making a sound electronically speaking into a microphone or playing a musical instrument that's plugged into this amplifier. So it's a variable frequency again, a variable current and uh and so sometimes the current is going to be is going to allow a certain number of electrons through because there's you know, as you build up the uh,

the charge on the cathode side. Some electrons are going to pass through that gate is going to be strong enough energy for it to go through the gate. Other times the the signal is going to be lower. It's gonna allow more electrons through. That's the whole basis of the amplifier. So the cathode looks like a filament. You have to in order to make electrons shed, you have

to add energy into this system. So and this is a rather than the variable source which is what we see in the gate, this is a steady power source that's going into the cathode. So it heats up this filament, which gives off light. Depending upon what kind of vacuum tube it is, it may be a different color, like a lot of them are kind of an orange ish color. If you're talking about a vacuum tube for like a

big power system, it tends to burn white hot. But that's when it starts to shed thousands and thousands of electrons. The energy from the electricity is is enough to break the electrons free from their shells and then they will

go toward the positively charged anode. So that is the basis of you just got a it's like a podcast within a podcast that was a basic electronics of what a triode is and what it does, or really vacuum tubes in general, Although there are other kinds of vacuum tubes besides triots, they're not it's not a one to one you know. Tryout is just one type of vacuum tube, all right. So you've got several of those in their

acting as amplifiers, UM. And then you've also got your your power source, you've got your capacitors, you've got resistors UM. And then you've got the antenna. I've already spoken about those as well. And the copper coils which generate the

electromagnetic field. Those are your basic component that all together make up the guts of the thereman and there Actually, I've seen videos online that kind of give an overall view of how to build a thereman, and they're also a theremin kits out there if you want to try and make your own. Um, it's an interesting project, I understand. Like even the guy who was I was watching these videos, the guy who builds the theorem and actually said, um,

I can build them, but I can't play them. So he said he loves he enjoys building them, and he tends to build them for other people like like bands and stuff that are interested in using the thereman. Well, Um, anyone interested in in playing the thereman should check out an article that Jane mcgrathrope for the website called how to play a theoreman Um and she actually quoted some of the people who are well known theoreminists dereminist derman players, deremanators.

They come from the future. It's terrible, Sarah uh. Lydia cavina is one. Uh. She actually studied under Leon theoreman um and basically had suggested that it's good to keep your feet about a foot apart zero point three meters UM. But it really depends on the theoremin and uh, you know, and how far you want to stand away from it, and of course, as you mentioned, the capacitance of the person playing it um. But generally depending on the number of octaves available um in that theoreman, I mean the

the range of the theoremin. Uh. You might have to stand farther away if it has a greater range um,

according to uh um Miss cavina Um. Also uh, apparently you can actually tune the device yourself by putting your right hand at your shoulder or I guess your left hand depending on how you're playing it, So you start with your hand at your shoulder regardless, um and then just uh she said the ideas you need to play the song slowly when you're getting started, because, UM, it takes a while to get used to uh controlling the pitch that you're trying to to make if you're actually

trying to play a song and melody with it. Um and uh Clara Rockmore another person that um Jane quoted in her article and basically said that you have to be very conscious of what you're doing with your body. Um. You know, as a percussionist, I tend to uh groove a little bit, you know, start getting into it and bobbing and getting into the motion. Uh. That can affect the way you're playing because the theramin is uh going by your body movement and how close you are to it.

So anything any other stray movement is going to affect the sound coming out of the theramin. So you have to be very careful, um, and you have to be very conscious of what you're doing when you're when you're trying to play that you know, posture and and uh stray movements and affect it. It's a lot different from saying a guitar where you have a string that, assuming it's properly tuned, when you play that string while pressing down at a certain fret, it's always going to produce

the same note, right. Uh, there's there's no variation there. But with a thereman, it's all about the distance between you and the antenna and uh, and and not and and again your your body mass. So while two different people can pick up the same guitar and play the same series of notes just following the same threats, that wouldn't necessarily be the same story if they were trying to play a thereman and standing at the same distance

from the device. Just pretty interesting to me. Um. You know, I had mentioned also about the amplifiers using vacuum tubes and that that tends to be a preference. Would you like to to weigh in a little bit as a musician about that, Well, you know it, it kind of depends on the sound you're getting, you know. Um, most of the musicians and I rarely talk to people about using a theraman in a band, but I mean vacuum

tubes and amplifiers in general, vacuum tubes. Most of what I've heard people say is that they feel that vacuum tubes produce a warmer sound, which is the yeah, and again it's it's really in the ear of the listener. To be honest, you might say that solid state produces a flatter sound. And these are all terms that don't really have a way of it's hard to it's hard to put it in a measurable sense, but it is.

It is one of those things that when you start listening to it, you say, you know what that does? It just sounds better? Yeah, you know. And uh. And even today, a lot of apps out there for various musical instruments, not just the one, not just the amplifiers that you'll find in Theraman, still use vacuum tubes, even though the technology otherwise has almost disappeared. Solid state era. Yeah,

well solid state too. I mean, you turn on a solid state device, amplifier whatever, um, it's going to be on a lot quicker up. Yeah, and a vacuum tube device will um and you can and you could see it too, if you have, if you could see through like I have. For example, I have a vacuum tube

amplifier and a solid state amplifier. Um, you turn it on and at first the vacuum tubes, you know, look as though they are you know, they would win the devices off, and then they start to glow and you could see that things are coming on and you could turn on a source of sound, say, you know, uh, turntable or a tune or radio tuner, and at first you won't hear anything, and as the vacuum tubes warm up, you know, the amplifier will begin to play the music

because they're actually coming online, but it takes them a while. Um makes me think of the the beginning of the documentary Back to the Future. Yeah, turning on all the apps, Yeah, documentary, it's yeah, but uh yeah, I mean it's it's funny though, because, um, it's sort of like vinyl for a lot of musicians too, because for you know, the vacuum tube manufacturers almost became extinct and as time is worn on and people have said, you know what, I really like the way that that works.

I like the sound that I get from vacuum tube amps, or you know, I had this other thing that uses vacuum tubes and I really like it. I actually have a Hammond organ that uses um vacuum tubes too, and you know, without some manufacturer, you know, so these things have have stayed in production, even though solid state for a while, it looked like it was going to you know, knock it out. But yeah, and just like uh, just like an incandescent light bulb, vacuum tubes will eventually burn out. Yes,

they will it. Uh. I mean it's it's not going to be super fast or anything. But that's why it's important that these industries still exist because otherwise we would have a finite number that and once we got to the end of it, that would be it. Yeah, so I guess we should be thankful for devices like the theremin and guitar amplifiers for keeping a a what what

otherwise people might say, an absolute technology alive and kicking. Anyway, that that pretty much wraps up this discussion on the thereman and what it is and how it does what it does. If you guys are interested in more, there are tons of videos online. We also have that article that Chris was mentioning about how to play with thereman in at how stuff works dot com and the guys if you have any suggestions, you can let us know

on Twitter and Facebook are handled. There is text stuff h s W or you can email us that addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought

to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you