tags: mus-407 sampling sampling-instruments
Light Tone Organ
The Light Tone Organ is a photoelectric instrument invented by Edwin Welte in Germany in 1936. It was an early [sampling] instrument that encoded [[waveform|waveforms]] as patters on rotating glass discs.
Playback was facilitated by rotating the discs across photoelectric cells, which would read the encoded waveforms. A filtered light beam controlled the [pitch] and [timbre] of the instrument based on the encoded samples.
It was largely destroyed in 1944 WWII allied bombings.
