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In common usage the term "keyboard" itself has come to mean an electronic musical instrument with keys similar to that of a piano, usually encompassing about four to six octaves.
Experimentation combining electricity and the piano began as early as the late 1860's, but it was not until 1939 that an American builder named Laurens Hammond introduced the first popular electronic keyboard instrument, the Hammond organ.
Continued experimentation and developments in electronic music led to the invention of Robert Moog in the mid-1960's, known as the Moog synthesizer. At first the musical community viewed this instrument as a novelty, until Walter Carlos released a Grammy-award winning album in 1967 called "Switched On Bach". By recording some of Johann Sebastian Bach's more popular music on the Moog synthesizer, Carlos demonstrated that an electronic keyboard can be played as a musical instrument in its own right.
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer were some of the first groups to use synthesizers in their music, beginning around 1967.
Yamaha introduced the first fully MIDI-capable keyboard in 1983, the Yamaha DX-7, which allowed the player to interact with computer-generated sounds through Musical Instrument Digital Interface. While synthesized sounds had been created as early as the 1920's, the DX-7 gave the player easy access to a wide variety of distinctive sounds, even during a live performance.
Most electronic keyboards today use a combination of synthesized sounds and sampled sounds. A synthesized sound is created by the manipulation of the square, saw-tooth, or sine wave of the electronically-generated tone, while a sampled sound is a digital "copy" of the sound of a pre-recorded actual musical instrument.
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