There was a time when the sound of synthesizer was so new and otherworldly that it provoked strong emotional responses—anger, fear, laughter. As the English professor Nicholas Laudadio recounts in the journal Science Fiction Studies, a German musicologist complained in 1954 that they reminded him of “barking hell-hounds—these sounds come from a world in which there are no humans, but only devilish beings.” Of course, the electrical transmission of sound is as old as the telephone (1876).
