Electronic musical instrument An electronic musical instrument is a musical instrument that produces its sounds using electronics . In contrast , the term electric instrument is used to mean instruments whose sound is produced mechanically , and only amplified or altered electronically - for example an electric guitar . Usually the instrument will have some way of controlling the sound , such as by adjusting the pitch , frequency , or duration of each note . All electric and electronic musical instruments can be viewed as a subset of audio signal processing applications . Simple electronic musical instruments are sometimes called sound effects ; the border between sound effects and actual musical instruments is often hazy . French composer and engineer Edgard Varèse created a variety of compositions using electronic horns , whistles , and tape . Most notably , he wrote Poème Électronique for the Phillips pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958 . Electronic musical instruments are now widely used in most styles of music . The development of new electronic musical instruments continues to be a highly active and interdisciplinary field of research . Specialized conferences , notably the International Conference on New interfaces for musical expression , have organized to report cutting edge work , as well as to provide a showcase for artists who perform or create music with new electronic music instruments . Early electronic musical instruments In the broadest sense , the very first electrified musical instrument was the Denis d'or , dating from 1753 . It was followed by the Clavecin électrique by the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste de Laborde in 1761 . The first purely electronic musical instrument was the Telharmonium , built by Thaddeus Cahill in 1906 . Employing electric generators and tonewheels to produce notes , it had a length of 60ft and a weight of 200 tons ; because of a lack of suitable loudspeakers at that time , the music was distributed over the telephone network . One of the many instruments constructed in the following decades was the Theremin , invented by Leon Theremin in 1917 , which used a vacuum tube oscillator to make sounds that depended on the interactions of the user with an RF field . This was followed in 1928 by the Ondes Martenot which had a keyboard as well as several auxiliary controllers . The sound of the Ondes Martenot is used extensively in the Turangalîla-Symphonie and other works by Olivier Messiaen . However , these were not true synthesizers in the modern sense , as they were not configurable to produce a range of complex sounds by additive or subtractive synthesis , instead generating single pure tones with controllable pitch , amplitude and vibrato . Ca. 1929 Friedrich Trautwein invented the Trautonium in Berlin . It was played with a resistor wire which has to be pressed against a metal plate . Oskar Sala was one of the first players and continued development until his death in 2002 . Paul Hindemith wrote some compositions for it . These early electronic instruments produced only pure tones and were frequently used to make avant garde music . In April 1935 , Laurens Hammond introduced the Hammond tonewheel organ , which generated complex tones using an electro-mechanical principle derived from the design of the Telharmonium . Later Hammond used the Leslie speaker to achieve special modulation effects , and the resulting Hammond organ sound is still regarded as the benchmark for the `` electric organ '' sound . This sound can be simulated by many modern synthesizers and digital samplers . Synthesizers The most commonly used electronic instruments are synthesizers , so-called because they artificially generate sound using techniques such as additive , subtractive , FM and physical modelling synthesis to create sounds . Dr. Robert Moog introduced the first practical commercial modern music synthesizer with his Moog synthesizer . This instrument used a series of tone generators with keys that would adjust the tone generators ' pitch . Moog resolved to sell Theremins to gain enough money to engineer this synthesizer . The first digital synthesizers were academic experiments in sound synthesis using digital computers . FM synthesis was developed for this purpose , as a way of generating complex sounds digitally with the smallest number of computational operations per sound sample . Modern electronic musical instruments While synthesizers dominate the current market , other instruments such as the radiodrum are being developed by people such as Peter Driessen and Andrew Schloss as an alternative to the standard user interfaces of traditional instruments . These modern electronic instruments seek to improve the musician 's ability to express music , rather than experimenting with tone which can then be done by synthesizers . External links 120 Years of Electronic Music History of Electronic Music Tons of Tones  ! !   : Site with technical data on Electronic Modelling of Musical Tones Categories : Electronic music instruments In other languages : Dansk | Deutsch | Español | Français | עברית | Nederlands | 日本語 | Polski | Slovenščina | Svenska | Українська 