Inspirational Cats: Harald Bode
Hamburg Germany's electronic music instrument pioneer and engineer Harald Bode created a lot of amazing and inspiring designs that are still used in electronic music today. Bode worked as a researcher in signal processing and on the development of electronic music instruments at the Heinrich Hertz Institute for Oscillation Research at the Technical University of Berlin. Bode's career spans from the 1930's until the late seventies when he was the chief engineer and inspiration at the Moog synthesiser company.
Early in his career Bode designed The Warbo Formant Orgel (1937) developed by Bode and C. Warnke.
The 'Warbo Formant Orgel' pioneered aspects of electronics that became standard in later instruments. The Warbo Formant Orgel was a partially polyphonic four-voice keyboard instrument with 2 filters and key assigned dynamic envelope wave shaping.
In 1947 Bode built the electronic Melochord a monophonic keyboard instrument based on vacuum tube technology in 1947 . The keyboard used pitches derived from the traditional equal-tempered 12 note scale with switches extending the 37 note range from three octaves to seven.
One of my personal favorites has to be the Bode Frequency Shifter created in 1964. A frequency shifter moves each of the components by a fixed amount in Hertz, it's a bit different from a harmonizer and pitch shifter, that class of shifter changes the sound spectrum by a fixed ratio.
Here's a video of the Bode Frequency Shifter in action.
Be sure to checkout the Harald Bode: Tone Color - Known and Unknown Sounds exhibit at Burchfield Penny Art Center at Buffalo State College.