Even though the wind controller is perceived as a modern instrument, I did find a US patent application from 1938 by Benjamin Franklin Miessner who came up with an “apparatus for the production of music”. The patent drawings show a clarinet style wind instrument with electronics to produce sound. Mr. Miessner filed many patent applications and can be considered to be the birth father of the Wurlitzer electric piano as that was based on his inventions of an electric upright piano from 1935. Whether the “apparatus” was ever produced, I couldn find out.
It’s just to show electric music isn’t something from the last 50 years, but has a much longer history. In my neck of the woods, around Eindhoven, the Netherlands, employees of the electronics company Philips, mostly known from their light bulbs, radio’s, TV’s and inventors of the CD player, were producing electronic music already in the late 50’s at their research center called NatLab, derived from the Dutch phrase “Natuurkundig Laboratorium”, in English “Physics Laboratory”. There they researched and invented all kinds of things. The sound department worked with surround sound, samples and synthesizers before these words even existed. In 1957 they also released the first record with electronic music with a piece called ‘Song of the Second Moon’. One of the artists, Dick Raaijmakers, called himself Kid Baltan (Natlab spelled backwards).
At their lab they used tape recorders (then called a magnetophone), microphones to record all kind of sounds to create samples and phrases and function generators that were normally used in the lab for testing and calibration as sound wave oscillators.
Tat aside, the ground work of what we today consider to be electronic wind instruments was done in the late 60’s and early 70’s of the 20th century. There are two inventions from those days that still live on in wind controllers today. On one side there was Bill Bernardi who came up with the Lyricon, a sax style wind controller with analog synthesizer and on the other side Nyle Steiner with his EVI, Electronic Valve Instrument, and later the EWI, Electronics Wind Instrument. The EVI was an analog wind instrument with trumpet style playing and the EWI was aimed at woodwind players. This was all developed long before MIDI became a standard for controlling synthesizers and sound modules. (You can read more about these early wind controllers in the history section)
Bernardi’s Lyricon became the basis of the Yamaha WX7, Yamaha’s first MIDI wind controller. After that Yamaha released the WX11 and WX5. The WX5 which was released in 199? was their last wind controller ever. They all use the same principle of a woodwind style mouthpiece with an artificial reed in which there’s a lever that senses the lip pressure to create an up and down pitch bend control signal. The newer Roland Aerophone AE-10 and AE-5 have a very similar setup.
Nyle Steiner’s EVI and EWI was produced by several companies, like Crumar and Akai. Akai still produces and sells their newer models. This line of controllers have a different mouthpiece, some with a bite sensor to create pitch, but mostly they use right hand thumb sensors that can sense rocking movements and transform in a control signal. As Akai only kept the woodwind style EWI’s alive, even though they implemented different fingering styles including one for valve instrumentalists, they stopped producing an EVI model, years ago. Johan Berglund of Berglund Instruments closed that gap by producing and selling a modern version of Nyle Steiner’s MIDI EVI, called the nuEVI.
Martin Hurni from Softwind, Switzerland, chose a different path altogether when he developed his Synthophone. The Synthophone is a converted standard alto saxophone. The saxophone is equipped with breath and lip sensors and switches. Those parts generate the MIDI note and controller data which is handled by the electronics which is placed in the bell of the alto sax.
Next to that there were other companies that produced wind controllers. Casio had its DH range which used a simpler design with only notes and breath sensor lacking any sort of lip/pitch bend sensor. Nowadays companies like Aodyo Instruments, with their Sylphyo, Vindor Music with their Vindor ES1 produce wind controllers that lack a hardware pitch bend lip sensor but use new sensing technology to achieve the same by moving or shaking the instrument.
If that’s not enough there are plenty of DIY projects aimed at building wind controllers. Most of them never made it to market or are so small I haven’t found them in my search.
The wind controller market is a very small niche in the electronic musical instrument industry. Sales numbers are very small in comparison to other type of equipment the larger companies produce, so it seems hard for them to justify putting down the money for development. Akai Pro still has its existing EWI range on offer and Roland stepped in more recently. Yamaha hasn’t released a new wind controller for over 20 years and stopped selling the latest WX5 a few years ago in Asia and the US. Due to EU legislation or regulation the WX5 wasn’t available in Europe ever since the beginning of this century.