Any 5 musical instruments works with electricity?

Answer 1

The pat answer to this question might be a list of electric guitar, electric bass, keyboard synthesizer, digital drum kit, and a MIDI wind synthesizer controller.

However, most of these instruments are just natural instruments with amplification hung off the side (certainly the amplified bass and guitar!) So, let's fill in some of those spots with two very un-natural, but entirely electrical/electronic approaches to making Musical Instruments:

Telharmonium: Cahill's Telharmonium was an ingenious arrangement of gears and magnetic pickups: the gears were turned (by some mechanical or electromechanical means0 and the pickups generated pitches as the gear teeth varied the output from the pickups at audio frequencies. This instrument was built into the New York City telephone system, and phone subscribers could sign up for a large-speakered transducer for their homes. For a few hours each evening, a musician would sit at the keyboard and play a concert that was heard around the city. The Telharmonium did not last for long, but may well qualify as the first electric organ. The Hammond organs (specifically the tone-bar slider organs) of later decades work on exactly the same principle! It was built around the turn of the 20th century, but was gone before 1915.

Theremin: Leon Theremin (Lev Terman) was a Russian scientist who was working with remote sensors. He developed a musical instrument which is so uniquely different from anything else that it qualifies as the first electronic instrument. The theremin works by beating two radio-frequency oscillators together. The physics of mixers is such that, when the output of the two oscillators (which are themselves too high in frequency to be heard by the human ear), the result is the sum and difference frequencies of the inputs. If the two oscillators are tuned together, their difference is 0, which is, of course, below human hearing as well. Their sum is always higher than the two oscillators, so we'll neglect that. As the difference between the oscillators differs, the difference frequency rises into and through the range of audibility. The theremin has a pitch antenna, which allows the nearness of a player's hand to change one of the oscillators, and determines the pitch. The other hand is used with another antenna to control volume. This playing paradigm is different from all the natural instruments, which require blowing into a tube or across a hole or bowing a string or striking a surface to produce sound, and which change volume by some variation of those efforts. The most famous player of the Theremin was the Virtuosa, Clara Rockmore. Despite Theremin's and Rockmore's desire that the theremin be treated as a legitimate music instrument, its fame seems to have been largely relegated to horror and sci-fi movie backgrounds. It has recently reappeared in Hollywood, played for the movies "Monster House" and "Alien Tresspass." Theremin brought his instrument and ideas to America first in 1929.