In electronic instruments, the device that transmits the player’s actions, via electrical connections, to relevant parts of the instrument’s sound generating and shaping circuitry. Usually the controller is a keyboard (often permitting some level of touch-sensitivity), but some are designed to utilize the techniques of string, wind and percussion players. Other kinds of controllers include ribbon controllers (see Fingerboard, (2)), joysticks, slide or rotary faders, thumbwheels, or computer control devices such as alphanumeric keyboards, mice, light-pens, and touch-sensitive screens. Some instruments are played without direct physical contact, e.g. the Theremin; in other instruments or sound installations the electrical circuitry for any of a variety of parameters is affected by the detection of movement, for example by a video camera or the interruption of a light beam.
In many cases the controller is independent of the console: connection may be made via a cable or by radio transmission. In early electronic instruments the controller operated only within a single instrument (the equivalent of the remote control aspect of every acoustic keyboard instrument); towards the mid-1960s Voltage control was introduced in the earliest modular synthesizers to vary specific functions of different modules. Around the end of the 1970s some synthesizer manufacturers introduced their own protocols, permitting similar control linkages between different instruments of their own manufacture, and in 1983, with the introduction of MIDI, this was expanded to cover (in principle if not always in practice) all electronic instruments and independent controllers with compatible connection ports.
Because acoustic keyboard instruments invariably involve a similar degree of operation by remote control, their keyboards may also be designated as controllers.
See also Electronic instruments, §IV, 5(iv) and 6(vi).
H. Davies: ‘Elektronische instrumenten: Classificatie en mechanismen’, Elektrische Muziek: drie jaar acquisitie van elektrische muziekinstrumenten (The Hague, 1988; Fr. trans., 1990) [exhibition catalogue]; rev. as ‘Electronic Instruments: Classification and Mechanisms’, I Sing the Body Electric, ed. H.-J. Braun (Hofheim, forthcoming), 43–58
J. Pressing: Synthesizer Performance and Real-Time Techniques (Oxford, 1992), 375–89
C. Roads: The Computer Music Tutorial (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 613–58
HUGH DAVIES