Le Caine, Hugh

Le Caine, Hugh, Canadian physicist, acoustician, and innovative creator of prototypical electronic musical instruments; b. Port Arthur, Ontario, May 27, 1914; d. Ottawa, July 3, 1977. Although his childhood training combined music and science, he chose to emphasize science in his formal studies; he received a B.S. degree from Queen’s Univ. in Kingston, Ontario, in 1938 and an M.S. in 1939, and obtained his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the Univ. of Birmingham in England in 1952; he also studied piano briefly at the Royal Cons, of Music of Toronto and privately with Viggo Kihl. His childhood dream was to one day apply scientific techniques to the development and invention of new musical instruments, and he went on to develop ground-breaking electronic musical instruments that ultimately formed the basis of pioneering electronic music studios at the Univ. of Toronto (1959) and McGill Univ. in Montreal (1964). He exhibited electronic music instruments at Expo ’67 in Montreal. He contributed numerous articles on his findings in various scholarly journals. While he saw himself as a designer of instruments that assisted others in creative work, he himself realized a number of striking electronic compositions in the course of his development, among them the now-classic Dripsody (1959), which used only the sound of a single drop of water falling; other compositions were Alchemy (1964) and Perpetual Motion for Data Systems Computer (1970). His instruments revolutionized musical composition; his Sackbut synthesizer (1945-48; 1954-60; 1969-73) is today recognized as the first voltage-controlled synthesizer; among his other instruments were the Spectrogram (1959-62; designed to facilitate the use of complex sine tones in composition), the Alleatone (e. 1962; “a controlled chance device selecting one of 16 channels with weighted probabilities”), Sonde (1968-70; which can generate 200 sine waves simultaneously), and Poly-phone (1970; a polyphonic synthesizer operated by a keyboard with touch-sensitive keys).