Electric and Electronic

The combination of electricity with music making was one of the most important developments of 20th century instrument design. Electrophones, or instruments that either generate or amplify tones using electricity, take a wide variety of forms. These include instruments that produce a tone acoustically and amplify it electronically, those that produce a tone electrically then amplify it acoustically, and those that both produce and amplify sounds electrically. Electric instruments can also use a broad spectrum of more traditional interfaces for music making, including keyboards, bowed and plucked strings, wind, and percussion. Electric instruments may be analogue or digital, the later of which also includes instruments with MIDI interfaces using computers. The National Music Museum’s collection includes several examples of the choralcelo, one of the first electric musical instruments invented, bowed and plucked stringed instruments with electromagnetic pickups, and several MIDI compatible interfaces