I have become a regular listener of the BBC’s Add to playlist podcast (which definitely deserves its own blog post, but that’s something for another day). It’s a programme where I am exposed to a lot of music I haven’t heard before, and the one experience I’d like to share with you today is hearing a theremin.
If you don’t know what that is - don’t fret, I didn’t know either. The Wikipedia article as usual has you covered: the theremin is an electronic instrument that looks like two antennae, which are actually half of a capacitor and act as position sensors for your hands. One hand controls the pitch and the other controls the amplitude of the sound. Caronlina Eyck has a nice video showing how she plays a scale:
It sounds quite eerily like a human voice, don’t you think? I also listened to the episode on the theremin by the Klassik für Klugscheisser Podcast (in German), which has a few more tidbits about the sounds and history of this instrument.
Anyway, the song I heard in the original podcast was an arrangement of Claire de Lune by Carolina Eyck for theremin and voice:
If you got hooked, here’s the whole album and here is her website.
The image for this post comes from Wikipedia and can be re-used with a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
