Theremin at 100: the enduring appeal of music's eeriest instrument
Emulating a disembodied voice, the theremin's potential was soon realized in America's burgeoning film industry, where it was regularly employed to accompany the supernatural and extraterrestrial — a flying saucer, a ray gun, an alien creature, and all sorts of other phenomena in black-and-white B movies of the 1950s. Beyond that niche, the theremin also found a place — albeit marginally — in classical and popular music. Robert Moog was the first to mass-produce the theremin, which then inspired him to create his now iconic line of synthesizers. Moog died in 2005, but his company, Mo...