Electronically-produced music was first experimented with during the 1870s when Bahá'u'lláh was in the prison in Akka. One of the earliest fully electronic musical instruments was invented in 1919 by Russian Leon Theremin in the same year as the unvealing of theTablets of the Divine Plan. But it was not until the early years of the Ten Year Crusade(1953-1963) that the first synthesizer was built at RCA in the USA.; and in the first years of the NineYear Plan(1964-1973) that the first record based only on synthesizer-produced music was released: Switched On Bach in 1968.

The story of synthetic, electronic, music, theremins and synthesizers, in the forty years since the Beach Boys tried to get the use of electronic teachnology in the production of their 1966 song Good Vibrations is full of the names of the inventors and developers of aspects of electronic technology like Robert Moog and the names of musical artists who used this musical technology. This forty year history is also filled with the names of films and TV shows where electronically produced music provided background sounds.-Ron Price, “Internet Sites on the Synthesizer” and “Into the Music,” ABC Radio National, May 10th 2006, 5:00 p.m.

Those forty years have been
busy ones since I left home
in ’66 and the Beach Boys
began churning out songs.

All this synthetic, electronic
music has been on the edge
of my life, quite peripheral
to the main flow of what it
has all been about from ’66
to ’06 in this new century.

But that Plan, initiated away
back in 1919, has been at the
centre of it all, it’s a symbol
of another synthesis much more
peripheral to the world’s agenda.
A new world that is played in by
a few and not touched by the many,
just like that synthesizer-theremin,
an instrument which produces
music without being touched.

The principle of heterodyning
oscillators, allows a theremin
to generate an audio signal and
the capacitance of the human
body affects these signals too.
The complexity of teaching in
this Plan is also as mysterious
and as difficult to understand
and implement but, however
difficult, a new music is being
produced in the background of
this new age; though we may
at first be unaware of its affect
yet the virtue of the grace vouch-
safed unto us will sooner or later
exercise its influence on our souls1.

1 Bahá'u'lláh, Bahá'í Prayers.

Ron Price
May 15th 2006