A short history of the synthesizer

The synthesizer wasn't invented in a single moment — it was argued into existence over more than a century, by tinkerers, physicists and pop stars. Here's the short version, and the instrument in this collection that carries each idea forward.

1. 1897

   The Telharmonium

   Thaddeus Cahill's 200-ton behemoth built tones by adding sine wavesfrom spinning “tonewheels”, and streamed live music down telephone lines to restaurants and parlours — decades before radio. It is the ancestor of additive synthesis and the drawbar organ.

   try itPS-ORG organ→
2. 1920

   The Theremin

   Léon Theremin built the first instrument you played without touching it: two antennas sense your hands in an electromagnetic field — one for pitch, one for volume. It gave science-fiction its wail. A French cousin, the Ondes Martenot (1928), added a sliding ribbon for control — an idea PS-20 keeps alive.

   try itPS-AER theremin→orPS-20 ribbon→
3. 1957

   The RCA Mark II

   A room-filling vacuum-tube machine at the Columbia-Princeton studio, programmed with punched paper tape— the first synth you could “sequence”. The idea that a pattern, not a live performance, drives the notes runs straight through to every step sequencer.

   try itPS-EUC euclid→
4. 1964

   Voltage control — Moog & Buchla

   On opposite coasts, Bob Moog (with a piano keyboard and his famous resonant “ladder” filter) and Don Buchla (no keyboard — knobs and touchplates) made synthesis modular and controllable by voltage. Subtractive synthesis — start bright, then carve it down with a filter — was born.

   try itPS-303 acid→
5. 1970

   The Minimoog

   Moog shrank the modular into one wooden box with a keyboard and hard-wired the best signal path — portable, affordable and instantly playable. The synth left the laboratory and walked onto the stage.

   try itPS-PAD pad→
6. 1978

   Polyphony & memory — the Prophet-5

   Sequential's Prophet-5 played five notes at once and, crucially, remembered your patches in digital memory. Chords and recallable sounds: the modern synth workflow starts here.

   try itPS-PRG progression→
7. 1980

   Roland's happy accidents — TR-808 & TB-303

   A drum machine with unrealistically deep booms and a bass synth meant to fake a guitarist both flopped— until second-hand bargain-hunters turned the 808 into the heartbeat of hip-hop and house, and the 303's squelch into a whole genre.

   try itPS-808 boom→andPS-303 acid→
8. 1983

   FM goes digital — the Yamaha DX7

   Using John Chowning's frequency-modulation idea, the DX7 made glassy bells, gongs and that unmistakable electric piano — all-digital and preset-driven. It became the best-selling synth of the decade. The same year, MIDI let any synth talk to any other — the reason a laptop can still drive a 1983 keyboard today.

   try itPS-DX fm→
9. 1979

   Samplers — play anything

   The Fairlight CMI, then the Emulator and Akai's rack samplers, let you record a sound and play it back across a keyboard. Why synthesise a piano when you can capture one? PS-10 uses a sampled voice for exactly this reason.

   try itPS-10 keyboard→
10. 1983

    Modelling the physics — Karplus–Strong

    Instead of recording or subtracting, a new idea modelled the instrument itself: pluck a virtual string by feeding a burst of noise into a tuned, decaying delay. Physical modelling makes a convincing string out of almost nothing.

    try itPS-KS koto→
11. 1996

    Synths become software

    Steinberg's VST turned synths into plug-ins; trackers and tools like Reaktor put a whole studio in a laptop. Granular synthesis (chopping sound into tiny grains) and wavetable synthesis (scanning through drawn single-cycle waveforms) thrived now that CPU was cheap.

    try itPS-GRN grain→andPS-WAV draw→
12. 2011

    Sound in the browser — the Web Audio API

    A web standard arrived that could synthesise audio in real time inside a page — oscillators, filters, delays and all — with nothing to install. The lab, the stage and the studio now fit in a browser tab.

13. 2026

    PlasticSynth

    Sixteen instruments and a shared studio, every one built from the ideas above and running entirely in your browser. The whole history on this page is a button you can press — start with the guide, or open the collection.