Léon Theremin

Lev Sergeyevich Termen (Лев Сергеевич Термен; 27 August 1896 – 3 November 1993), or Léon Theremin in the United States, was a Russian and Soviet inventor, most famous for his invention of the theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments and the first to be mass-produced. He also devised the interlace technique[1] for improving the quality of a video signal, still widely used in video and television technology. His listening device, "The Thing", hung for seven years in plain view in the United States Ambassador's Moscow office and enabled Soviet agents to eavesdrop on secret conversations.

Literature

• Bulat Galeyev, Sovetskiy Faust. Lev Termen, pioner elektronnogo iskusstva [Советский Фауст: Лев Термен, пионер электронного искусства], Kazan: Kazan magazine, 1995, 96 pp. Biography. (Russian)
  • Soviet Faust: Leon Theremin, Pioneer of Electronic Art, trans. Sally Brown, Sydney: ETT Imprint, 2010, 96 pp. [1] (English)
• Leonardo Music Journal 6: "Leon Theremin, Pioneer of Electronic Art", 1996. Special section. [2] (English)
  • Bulat M. Galeyev, "Light and Shadows of a Great Life: In Commemoration of the One-Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Leon Theremin, Pioneer of Electronic Art".
• Albert Glinsky, Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage, University of Illinois Press, 2000, xvi+403+[30] pp. Biography. (English)
• Masami Takeuchi, Ether Music and the Man who Lived 20th Century Russia, Tokyo: Gakuyosha, 2000, 183 pp. Biography. (Japanese)
• Natascha Drubek-Meyer, "Between 'Bad Things' and 'Good Vibrations': Leon Theremin and his T-Vox", ARTMargins, Sep 2006. (English)
• Texts by Andrey Smirnov

See also

• Arseny Avraamov
• Theremin Center

Links

• http://www.thereminvox.com/
• http://vimeo.com/5143717
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17340257
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léon_Theremin