(Fr. sirène; Ger. Sirene; It. sirena).
A metal or cardboard disc with one or more rings of equally spaced perforations, which, when rotated in the path of a stream of air (by the air itself, by hand, or by a motor) interrupts it periodically to produce a note, the pitch of which depends on the number of perforations and the speed of rotation. The siren’s principal characteristics are its loud and penetrating quality (its loudness increases with the pitch) and the initial and final glissando caused by the acceleration of the disc to maximum speed when the motive power is applied and the corresponding deceleration when it is cut off.
The earliest sirens were devised at the end of the 18th century by Thomas Johann Seebeck and John Robison; improved models that produced a louder sound were developed in France in 1819 by Baron Charles Cagniard de la Tour and in Germany around 1850 by Friedrich Wilhelm Opelt. Polyphonic sirens, with concentric rings of perforations, were constructed by, among others, Opelt, Heinrich Wilhelm Dove and Hermann von Helmholtz; these normally produced a major triad. In 1872 Rudolph Koenig devised the ‘wave siren’ which has no perforations but in which the disc has a toothed or waveform-shaped rim.
Until the development of reliable electronic oscillators in the middle of the 20th century the siren was primarily used for accurate frequency measurements and acoustic demonstrations. During the 20th century more powerful sirens operated by compressed air (now usually replaced by electronic equivalents) have been used chiefly as signalling devices in ships and factories, on emergency vehicles and to give warnings of danger; sometimes, as with foghorns, these are klaxons [claxons] with a fixed pitch rather than true sirens. Mouth-blown sirens, about the size of a whistle and containing a metal disc, include the Acme siren. ‘Light sirens’, in which a perforated disc is placed between a beam of light and a photoelectric cell, have formed the basis of the sound-generating systems in a number of electronic instruments since about 1916 (see Electronic instruments, §I, 3).
Sirens of various types were included in some theatre orchestras during the early years of the 20th century and in ensembles accompanying silent films and music-hall acts. They were also used by a number of early 20th-century composers, including Varèse (especially Ionisation, 1929–31), Milhaud, Satie, (Parade, 1916–17), Hindemith, Max Brand (Maschinist Hopkins, 1929), Weill (Marie Galante, 1934) and Prokofiev (Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, 1936–7); a klaxon is used in Shostakovich’s Symphony no.2 ‘Oktyabryu’ (1927) and Bliss’s ballet Miracle in the Gorbals (1944). Since 1950 sirens and klaxons have been used by, among others, Cage, Françaix, Shchedrin, Xenakis (88 mouth sirens in Terrêtektorh, 1966), Kagel (a genuine Cagniard de la Tour siren in Der Schall, 1968), Schnittke (Symphony no.1, 1972), Penderecki (at least two works), Del Tredici, Rautavaara, Peter Maxwell Davies, Yuasa, Alexander Goehr, Lucier, Robin Holloway, Henze, Goebbels and Henry Brant.
Industrial and marine sirens and klaxons have been the primary sound sources in several environmental presentations, starting with the series of performances in the USSR between 1918 and 1923 under the title Concert of Factory Sirens and Steam Whistles, which included Arseny Avraamov’s Simfoniya gudkov [Symphony of Factory Sirens] (1922); more recently they have been used in Triton (1976–7) by Davide Mosconi, Maritime Rites (1980) by Alvin Curran, and in Toot ’n Blink Chicago (1982) by Charlie Morrow. Since 1983 the biennial Sound Symposium festival in St John's, Newfoundland, has established a tradition of Harbour Symphonies performed on ships’ klaxons.
Grove1 (W.H. Stone)
H.L.F. von Helmholtz: Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (Brunswick, 1863, 4/1877; Eng. trans., 1875 as On the Sensations of Tone, 2/1885/R, 6/1948), 11–14, 161–5, 372, 413–14
A. Avraamov: ‘Gudki’, Gorn, no.9 (1923); Eng. trans. as ‘The Symphony of Sirens’, Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. D. Kahn and G. Whitehead (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 245–52
B. Hopkins: ‘Sirens’, Experimental Musical Instruments, xii/4 (1997), 13–18; xiii/1 (1997), 19–22
HUGH DAVIES