Hermann von Helmholtz

b. August 31, 1821 in Potsdam (G), died September 8, 1894, in Berlin-Charlottenburg; physiology and anatomy professorships in Königsberg, Bonn and Heidelberg;

beginning 1870 a physics professor in Berlin. In his «Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik» (Engl. «On the Sensation of Tone,» 1885), published 1863 in Braunschweig, Helmholtz was the first to show in detail how, unlike with noises, sounds produced by instruments and voices consist of an endless number of simple vibrations. Aided by eight tuning-fork oscillators calibrated to the first tones of a natural secondary tone series, he imitated among other sounds the vowels of the human voice. Although he stresses that portions of noise (for example the woody bumping of a piano’s hammers, the scratching of a violin’s bow) and the complex fading in and out of the vibrating process (for example the slow build-up of the secondary tone structure when blowing into a metal, wind instrument) play a central role and their irregularity makes them hard to produce, this is precisely what reveals the founding principle of sound synthesis.

Golo Föllmer