The first sample-playback synthesizers used glass or film disks, where a looped sound was encoded as an optical soundtrack, circling the disk in a series of concentric rings, one for each note. A DC lamp above the disk provided illumination and a radial bank of photocells below generated the audio signals as the disk rotated. As the waveforms weren't actually recorded, the first units didn't qualify as samplers, but rather wavetable synthesizers, with synthetic waveform amplitudes printed onto the transparent disk or encoded as slots cut into an opaque disk. These included Pierre Toulon's Cellulophone (France, 1927), Emerick Spielmann's Superpiano (Austria, 1927), Edwin Welte's Light-Tone Organ (Germany, 1936), Ivan Eremeef's Syntronic Organ and Photona (1934/35, USA), and the Radio Organ of a Trillion Tones (1931) and the Polytone Organ (1934) by A. Lesti and Fredrick Sammis in the USA. Some of these devices did make the bridge across to actual sample playback. These included the 1930 Hardy-Goldwaithe Organ (a keyboard instrument encoding 71 sampled notes onto a single optical disk) and Sammis' "Singing Keyboard" in 1936, which played soundtracks stored on strips of 35 mm film. Optical sample players had a brief comeback in the early 70's with the Optigan, a low-cost
Photography ©2002 F. Balck, IPPT, Do Clausthal.
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