Experience Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in Virtual Reality: Download the Free App Created by Queen & Google

in Music, Technology | October 5th, 2016

You don’t just lis­ten to “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody”; you expe­ri­ence it. Any­one who’s ever heard Queen’s sig­na­ture pro­gres­sive rock epic knows it, and any­one who’s ever per­formed all six min­utes of it at a karaoke bar under­stands it more deeply still. The song, which rumor holds to have cost more to record than any sin­gle to date, made use of the lat­est stu­dio tech­niques; now, tech­nol­o­gy bare­ly imag­in­able when the song hit the charts in 1975 has giv­en us a whole new way to expe­ri­ence “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody”: in vir­tu­al real­i­ty, through either the Google Card­board app or as a 360° video.

A col­lab­o­ra­tion between Queen, Google Play, and VR devel­op­er Eno­sis, The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence offers a three-dimen­sion­al audio­vi­su­al jour­ney fea­tur­ing “inter­ac­tive ele­ments and spa­tial sound, allow­ing you to step inside the music.” The Cre­ators Pro­jec­t’s Kara Weisen­stein describes it as “peer­ing into Fred­die Mercury’s brain. The musi­cian was famous­ly coy about the song’s mean­ing, and while it doesn’t give any­thing away, this expe­ri­ence ren­ders Mercury’s imag­i­na­tion in resplen­dent pur­ples and blues. The bal­lad is a play­ful won­der­land of bicy­cling skele­tons and ani­mat­ed globes. Dur­ing the opera, the scene is a spooky cave. The rock sec­tion is a neon trip through space, and the coda is a drip­py, inter­galac­tic auro­ra.”

“ ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’ is unusu­al, isn’t it?” asks Queen’s lead gui­tarist and self-described VR pro­po­nent Bri­an May in the video on the mak­ing of The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence above. “Even 40 years lat­er, or what­ev­er it is, [the 1975 song] still sounds inno­v­a­tive.” And it began inspir­ing inno­va­tion right after its record­ing, when it led to the six-minute film that, years before MTV, prac­ti­cal­ly invent­ed the form of the music video. Does this new project her­ald an era when every sin­gle must, by neces­si­ty, come accom­pa­nied by a full-fledged VR jour­ney? For the moment, that ques­tion remains among the unan­swered, right along­side the one Queen has been ask­ing for over four decades now: “Is this the real life? Is this just fan­ta­sy?”

Enter the The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence here. 

via The Cre­ators Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inside the Rhap­sody: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’ (2002)

Gui­tarist Bri­an May Explains the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’

Queen Doc­u­men­tary Pays Trib­ute to the Rock Band That Con­quered the World

The Music of Queen Re-Imag­ined by “Extra­or­di­nary” Clas­si­cal Pianist, Natalia Pos­no­va

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Pete Seeger Teaches You How to Play Guitar for Free in The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide (1955)

in Education, Music | October 4th, 2016

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Image by Josef Schwarz, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Along with earnest polit­i­cal pop­ulism and a renewed inter­est in region­al cul­tures, the folk revival of the fifties and six­ties brought with it a lib­er­at­ing sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty, as young writ­ers, singers, and artists dis­cov­ered that, tru­ly, any­one can play gui­tar. Or rather, any­one can pick up most any stringed instru­ment and, with a few fun­da­men­tals, enjoy the expe­ri­ence of writ­ing and play­ing music in a way that seemed unavail­able or for­bid­ding before peo­ple like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan appeared on the scene.

Both pop­u­lar­iz­ers of Woody Guthrie’s Depres­sion-era bal­lads and of obscure blues and folk artists, Dylan and Seeger took very dif­fer­ent approach­es to their art. The for­mer cul­ti­vat­ed a mys­tique that seems impos­si­ble to pen­e­trate, and that has made him seem—as Todd Haynes’ mas­ter­ful film I’m Not There dramatizes—like a series of dif­fer­ent peo­ple. But Seeger has always been Seeger, from his gen­tle, aw-shucks demeanor and warm acces­si­bil­i­ty to his staunch­ly pro­gres­sive mes­sages that speak to chil­dren and reg­u­lar folks as well as to those with more sophis­ti­cat­ed tastes and tal­ents.

So it seems only nat­ur­al that Seeger released an album of gui­tar instruc­tion, The Folksinger’s Gui­tar Guide, addressed to both begin­ners and more advanced play­ers. “I guess any musi­cal instru­ment can be as hard to play as you want to make it,” Seeger begins, in one of his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly flu­id tran­si­tions from song to speech: “If you want­ed to be a per­son like Andres Segovia or Mer­le Travis, why it would take a life­time of train­ing. But for most of us, play­ing a gui­tar can be about as sim­ple as walk­ing.” After that reas­sur­ing com­par­i­son, he does remind us, how­ev­er, that “it took us all a cou­ple years to learn how to walk.”

Seeger begins with first steps—tuning the instrument—and patient­ly leads his lis­ten­ers through some basic chord shapes, strum­ming tech­niques, and then more advanced pick­ing meth­ods, alter­nate tun­ings, and styles like Fla­men­co, “Rhum­ba Rhythm,” and “Mex­i­can Blues.” You can lis­ten to the album track-by-track on Spo­ti­fy, fur­ther up. (You can also find it kick­ing around on YouTube.) Like the great edu­ca­tor he was, Seeger also includes some help­ful visu­al aids in the album’s lin­er notes (see them here), includ­ing draw­ings of chord fin­ger­ings, musi­cal nota­tion, and gui­tar tab­la­ture for those who don’t read music. In addi­tion to his read­able instruc­tions, he also includes the lyrics to all of the folk songs ref­er­enced through­out.

“Prac­tice each small sec­tion over and over,” he writes in his intro­duc­tion, “until it comes easy. Actu­al­ly, if you enjoy play­ing the gui­tar, you shouldn’t think of it as prac­tic­ing, in the for­mal sense. Rather sim­ply play for your own enjoy­ment and that of your friends.” He also rec­om­mends that his lis­ten­ers “beg, bor­row, or steal” the records he ref­er­ences in the book­let, for “they will be of help to you in giv­ing you an idea of the scope and pos­si­bil­i­ties of the instru­ment.” I can’t think of a music teacher more invit­ing than Seeger, nor a method more relaxed.

A sec­ond vol­ume fea­tur­ing Jer­ry Sil­ver­man appeared soon after, and upped the ante a good bit. “Musi­cal stan­dards are on the rise,” Sil­ver­man says in his intro­duc­tion, “the vir­tu­oso folk gui­tarist is on the scene.” He promis­es to help the “strum­ming pop­u­la­tion… keep pace with the upward spi­ral.” You can be the judge of how suc­cess­ful he is in that effort. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, we don’t have Silverman’s sup­ple­men­tary mate­ri­als avail­able, but you can lis­ten to the com­plete Folksinger’s Gui­tar Guide: Vol­ume 2 above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Tay­lor Gives Free Acoustic Gui­tar Lessons Online

Learn to Play Gui­tar for Free: Intro Cours­es Take You From The Very Basics to Play­ing Songs In No Time

Paul McCart­ney Offers a Short Tuto­r­i­al on How to Play the Bass Gui­tar

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch Soviet Avant-Garde Composers Create Synthesized Music with Hand-Drawn Animations (1934)

in Art, Film, Music, Technology | October 4th, 2016

The Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion not only rad­i­cal­ly reshaped social and polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions in the soon-to-be Sovi­et Union, but it also rad­i­cal­ized the arts. “The Romanovs, who ruled Rus­sia for 300 years,” com­ments Glenn Altschuler at The Boston Globe, used “cul­ture as an instru­ment of polit­i­cal con­trol.” As the Bol­she­viks swept away lum­ber­ing czarist elit­ism, they brought with them an avant-gardism that also sought to be pop­ulist and proletarian—spearheaded by such exper­i­men­tal artists as film­mak­er Dzi­ga Ver­tov, poet, futur­ist actor, and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, and “supre­ma­tist” painter Kaz­imir Male­vich. While many of these artists were denounced as bour­geois obscu­ran­tists when the dog­mas of social­ist real­ism became their own instru­ments of polit­i­cal con­trol, for sev­er­al years, the nascent Com­mu­nist state pro­duced some of the most for­ward-think­ing art, music, dance, and film the world had yet seen.

That includes some of the first ful­ly syn­thet­ic music ever made, cre­at­ed by inno­v­a­tive meth­ods that pre­dat­ed syn­the­siz­ers by sev­er­al decades. We’ve like­ly all heard of the Theremin, for exam­ple, invent­ed in 1919 by Sovi­et engi­neer Leon Theremin. By the 1930s, oth­er inven­tive tech­nol­o­gists and com­posers had begun to exper­i­ment with oscil­lo­scopes and mag­net­ic tape, cut­ting or draw­ing wave­forms by hand to cre­ate syn­thet­ic sounds.

One avant-garde Sovi­et com­pos­er, Arse­ny Avraamov became inspired by the advent of sound record­ing tech­nol­o­gy in film. The process of opti­cal sound uses an audio track record­ed on a sep­a­rate neg­a­tive that runs par­al­lel with the film (see it explained above). After the devel­op­ment of this tech­nol­o­gy, writes Paul Gal­lagher at Dan­ger­ous Minds, Bauhaus artist Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy sug­gest­ed that “a whole new world of abstract sound could be cre­at­ed from exper­i­men­ta­tion with the opti­cal film sound track.”

Tak­ing up the chal­lenge after the first Russ­ian sound film—1929’s The Five Year Plan—Avraamov “pro­duced (pos­si­bly) the first short film with a hand-drawn syn­thet­ic sound­track.” One very short exam­ple of his tech­nique, at the top of the post, may not sound like much to us, but it pre­serves a fas­ci­nat­ing tech­nique and a look at what might have been had this tech­nique, and oth­ers like it, borne more fruit. Mono­skop describes Avraamov as “a com­pos­er, music the­o­rist, per­for­mance insti­ga­tor, expert in Cau­cu­sian folk music, [and] out­spo­ken crit­ic of the clas­si­cal twelve-tone sys­tem.” He was also the com­mis­sar of a min­istry set up to encour­age “the devel­op­ment of a dis­tinct­ly pro­le­tar­i­an art and lit­er­a­ture.” It’s not entire­ly clear how what he called “orna­men­tal sound” tech­niques fit that pur­pose. But along with inno­va­tors like Evge­ny Sholpo and Niko­lai Voinov—whose fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ments you can hear above and below—Avraamov showed that tech­nolo­gies gen­er­al­ly used to deliv­er enter­tain­ment and pro­pa­gan­da to pas­sive mass audi­ences could be manip­u­lat­ed by hand to cre­ate some­thing entire­ly unique.

The exper­i­ments of these sound pio­neers per­haps held lit­tle appeal for the aver­age Russ­ian, but they were enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly writ­ten up in a 1936 issue of Amer­i­can mag­a­zine Mod­ern Mechanix. “Voinov and Avraamov,” notes Gal­lagher, “briefly formed a research insti­tute in Moscow, where they hoped to cre­ate syn­thet­ic voic­es and under­stand the musi­cal lan­guage of geo­met­ric shapes. It didn’t last and, alas, closed with­in a year.”

via @WFMU/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Dzi­ga Vertov’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Exper­i­ments in Sound: From His Radio Broad­casts to His First Sound Film

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Eight Free Films by Dzi­ga Ver­tov, Cre­ator of Sovi­et Avant-Garde Doc­u­men­taries

Watch Russ­ian Futur­ist Vladimir Mayakovsky Star in His Only Sur­viv­ing Film, The Lady and the Hooli­gan (1918)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Hear a Playlist of the 336 Songs Mentioned in Bruce Springsteen’s New Memoir, Born to Run

in Books, Music | September 30th, 2016

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Image by Michele Lucon, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

FYI: Ear­li­er this week, Bruce Spring­steen released his high­ly-antic­i­pat­ed mem­oir, Born to Run. It comes accom­pa­nied by a com­pan­ion album, Chap­ter and Verse. And now a Spo­ti­fy playlist that fea­tures every sin­gle song ref­er­enced in the pages of the book–his own or oth­ers’. There’s lots of Springsteen–most of his discog­ra­phy, in fact–but also great tracks from Aretha Franklin, Van Mor­ri­son, Cream, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and more. If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here. Then set­tle in and enjoy 22 hours of music. You can start stream­ing the music below:

For any­one inter­est­ed, the nov­el­ist Richard Ford has a review of Born to Run (the auto­bi­og­ra­phy) in The New York Times. Ford’s Bas­combe tril­o­gy appears on Spring­steen’s List of His 20 Favorite Books.

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­­sion­al­­ly-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bruce Spring­steen Plays East Berlin in 1988: I’m Not Here For Any Gov­ern­ment. I’ve Come to Play Rock

Heat Map­ping the Rise of Bruce Spring­steen: How the Boss Went Viral in a Pre-Inter­net Era

Springsteen’s Favorite Books & Read­ing List

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Watch Benedict Cumberbatch Sing Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” with David Gilmour Live on Stage

in Music | September 29th, 2016

Around here, when we talk about Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch, we usu­al­ly talk about his knack for read­ing clas­sic texts–Kafka’s Meta­mor­pho­sis, Melville’s Moby-Dick, a poignant let­ter by Alan Tur­ing, even pas­sages from a Guan­tá­namo prisoner’s diary. But today we’re putting anoth­er one of his tal­ents on dis­play.

Above, watch Cum­ber­batch join David Gilmour live on stage to per­form Pink Floy­d’s 1979 song, “Com­fort­ably Numb.” The per­for­mance took place last night at Lon­don’s Roy­al Albert Hall. Enjoy.

Note: You can down­load free audio­books read by Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch if you sign up for a 30-Day Free Tri­al with Audi­ble.com.  That includes read­ings of Sher­lock Holmes, Jane Austen and Neil Gaiman. Find more infor­ma­tion on Audi­ble’s Free Tri­al pro­gram here.

via Rolling Stone

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

Ultra Ortho­dox Rab­bis Sing Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” on the Streets of Jerusalem

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

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Artificial Intelligence Program Tries to Write a Beatles Song: Listen to “Daddy’s Car”

in Music, Science | September 29th, 2016

Last May, we told you about Flow Machine, an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-dri­ven music com­pos­er that analy­ses composer’s styles and then cre­ates new works from that data. Devel­oped by François Pachet at Sony CSL-Paris, the ini­tial exper­i­ments demon­strat­ed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as played in the style of bossa nova, the Bea­t­les’ “Pen­ny Lane,” and Ennio Morricone’s roman­tic work. Admit­ted­ly, it wasn’t the most stun­ning moment in A.I.—a com­put­er was now doing what arrangers have been doing for years, apply­ing genre rules to a melody cre­at­ed in anoth­er genre.

How­ev­er, Flow Machine has returned with an inter­est­ing devel­op­ment: two upcom­ing albums of A.I.-created songs, from which two tunes have been released to give you a taste of com­put­er cre­ativ­i­ty. French com­pos­er and musi­cian Benoît Car­ré helped out with the arrange­ments and pro­duc­tion of the songs, and also wrote the lyrics, so it’s not com­plete­ly an A.I. cre­ation, we should note.

So what should we make of “Daddy’s Car,” above, an attempt to cre­ate an A.I song in the style of the Bea­t­les? The open­ing sec­onds fea­ture the three-part har­mo­ny of “Because,” but when the band kicks in, it’s clos­er to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds than the Fab Four. (If any­thing, it’s clos­er to the High Lla­mas.)

But does it sound like it was writ­ten by a human? Yes.

For some­thing stranger, try the oth­er song released so far: “Mr. Shad­ow,” writ­ten “in the style of Amer­i­can song­writ­ers such as Irv­ing Berlin, Duke Elling­ton, George Gersh­win and Cole Porter.”

Now this is much odd­er, a mix of coun­try twang, Daniel Lanois-style ambi­ence, along with a vocal that sounds like a cor­rupt­ed audio file. If you are look­ing for a true glimpse of the future, wrap your ears and san­i­ty around this one. Musi­cians and music fans, let us know in the com­ments what you think about this brave new world that has such hit sin­gles in it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Chat­bots Talk to Each Oth­er & Get Into a Deep Philo­soph­i­cal Con­ver­sa­tion

Noam Chom­sky Explains Where Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Went Wrong

Stephen Hawk­ing Won­ders Whether Cap­i­tal­ism or Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Doom the Human Race

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Hear the First Recording of Computer Generated Music: Researchers Restore Music Programmed on Alan Turing’s Computer (1951)

in Computer Science, Music, Technology | September 28th, 2016

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How­ev­er you feel about elec­tron­ic music, you’ll still find your­self lis­ten­ing to it most places you go. For bet­ter or worse, it has become mood music, sooth­ing the jan­gled nerves of cus­tomers in cof­fee shops and lulling bou­tique shop­pers into a pleas­ant sense of hip. Some com­put­er music pio­neers have moved on from com­pos­ing their own music to mak­ing com­put­ers do it for them. It’s pre­cise­ly the kind of thing I imag­ine Alan Tur­ing might have pur­sued had the com­put­er sci­ence giant also been a musi­cian.

In fact, Tur­ing did inad­ver­tent­ly cre­ate a com­put­er that could play music when he input a sequence of instruc­tions into it, which relayed sound to a loud­speak­er Tur­ing called “the hoot­er.” By vary­ing the “hoot” com­mands, Tur­ing found that he could make the hoot­er pro­duce dif­fer­ent notes, but he was “not very inter­est­ed in pro­gram­ming the com­put­er to play con­ven­tion­al pieces of music,” note Jack Copeland and Jason Long at the British Library’s Sound and Vision blog. Tur­ing “used the dif­fer­ent notes” as a rudi­men­ta­ry noti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem, “to indi­cate what was going on in the com­put­er.”

Instead, the task fell to school­teacher, pianist, and future com­put­er sci­en­tist Christo­pher Stra­chey to cre­ate the first com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed music, using Turing’s gigan­tic Mark II, its pro­gram­ming man­u­al, and “the longest com­put­er pro­gram ever to be attempt­ed.” After an all-night ses­sion, Stra­chey had taught the com­put­er to hoot out “God Save the Queen.” Upon hear­ing the com­po­si­tion the next morn­ing, Tur­ing exclaimed, “good show,” and Stra­chey received a job offer just a few weeks lat­er.

Once the BBC heard of the achieve­ment, they vis­it­ed Turing’s Com­put­ing Machine Lab­o­ra­to­ry and made the record­ings above in 1951, which include a ver­sion of Strachey’s “God Save the Queen” pro­gram and ren­di­tions of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” The “orig­i­nal 12-inch disc the melodies were record­ed on,” writes The Verge, “has been known about for a while, but when Copeland (a pro­fes­sor) and Long (a com­pos­er) lis­tened to it, they found the audio was not accu­rate.” The two describe in their blog post how they went about restor­ing the audio and how it came to exist in the first place.

While the music Turing’s com­put­er pro­duced sounds painful­ly prim­i­tive, it would be sev­er­al more years before com­posers began to real­ly exper­i­ment with com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed music beyond the rudi­men­ta­ry first steps, and well over a decade before the design of sys­tems that could oper­ate in real time.

Now, although they still require human input (“the sin­gu­lar­i­ty isn’t upon us,” writes Spin), com­put­ers have begun to com­pose their own music, like “Daddy’s Car,” a Bea­t­les-esque song gen­er­at­ed by a SONY CSL Research Lab­o­ra­to­ry AI called Flow Machine. Here, a com­pos­er mix­es and match­es dif­fer­ent ele­ments, a style, melody, lyrics, etc. from var­i­ous data­bas­es. The machine pro­duces the sounds. SONY labs have been gen­er­at­ing com­put­er-made jazz and clas­si­cal music for some time now—some of which we may have already heard as back­ground music.

As Spin points out, already a new start­up called Jukedeck promis­es to “gen­er­ate a song in the genre and mood of your choos­ing…” per­haps as “back­ground music for adver­tise­ments or YouTube vlogs.” True to the spir­it of the man who inad­ver­tent­ly invent­ed com­put­er music, and who the­o­rized how a com­put­er might demon­strate con­scious­ness, the soft­ware will ask you to con­firm that you are not a robot.

via The Verge

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” Played on a 1929 Theremin

in Music | September 27th, 2016

Here in Amer­i­ca, we’re liv­ing in some anx­ious times. And frankly my nerves are a lit­tle torn and frayed–especially after the run-up to last night’s debate. Maybe some of you feel the same. Maybe you could stand to relax a bit. Maybe this will do the trick.

Above, watch Peter Pringle per­form on the theremin “Over the Rain­bow,” the song orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten for 1939’s The Wiz­ard of Oz. And it’s not just any theremin. It’s the 1929 RCA theremin that belonged to the Hol­ly­wood therem­i­nist, Dr. Samuel Hoff­man. In fact, it’s the very same one that Hoff­man played on The Tonight Show with John­ny Car­son in 1956, below.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Jim­my Page Rock the Theremin, the Ear­ly Sovi­et Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment, in Some Hyp­not­ic Live Per­for­mances

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

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