A Telharmonium Recreation

During a lecture on the history of electronic audio equipment and instruments we learnt about the Telharmonium instrument and how it was used to transmit music through phone lines around the year of its production in 1896. When we were told by our lecturer that it’s sound was one that had been lost to history I thought it would make an interesting project to try and attempt a recreation of the lost sound and integrate it on another project of mine.

Researching the Telharmonium I found that the sound was generated through additive synthesis similar to what was found in Eminent organs around their earlier periods of production, which created a unique timbre in its harmonics from the laying up (additive) process with sine waves using it’s tone wheels. This created a clear, lush choir / string tone which we can imagine was similar to the Telharmonium, except where as with the latter this beautiful signal was likely warped and distorted through the low-quality phone lines and peculiar horn speakers, along with the enormous amount of energy required to run it perhaps generating more unwanted noise. In the recreation of the sound I took the above aspects into consideration, and designed an organ tone which I think makes for a decent inspired tone of this lost sound.

As the sounds of telephone line hum and electricity buzz was what came to mind thinking on its character and the quality of such an organ design, I decided it would fit well in a section of a soundtrack project filled with similar electronic and ambient sound design. Played along to a section of the film Metropolis, the following files are of the individual Telharmonium recreation, as well as the same clip alongside the other soundtrack elements and video section.

Recreated sound :

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hA6MIp4pyAPrVENJTu0V-gTex6M1H41O/view?usp=sharing

With backing tracks:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lmoxGjeNVfrufWg4V8XmPMzRNk8-lHvB/view?usp=sharing