Spanish Priest Created Techno Music 80 Years Ago

More than 80 years ago, a Spanish priest created a device to produce electronic music and broadcast it using a telegraph, a method similar to some used nowadays, said researcher Miguel Angel Delgado. The forgotten inventor was the priest Juan Garcia Castillejo, who created a so-called musical electro-composer device in 1933, long before the traditionally recognized origins of techno music during the 1980's in the United States. According to the research published in the book "Inventar en el Desierto" (Inventing in the Desert) the device was a programmable machine, capable of creating musical patterns using a sound and time selector, an engine to combine notes and mechanical vibrators. In statements to the specialized journal Materia, Miguel Molina, professor of Sound Art at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Valencia, said that this was a precedent for applications like Podcast or Spotify. Molina pointed out that in 1944 the priest published the book "La telegrafia rapida, el triteclado" (The swift telegraphy, the tri-keyboard), which dealt with the possibility of combining telegraphy, teletypewriter and typewriter keyboards with electronic music. All the inventions disappeared with the 1985 death of Garcia, considered by Molina to be a priest who created techno music in the 1940's. A relative of the priest told the Materia journal that his uncle kept an audio tape with instructions for manufacturing the electro-composer device under key, but it disappeared and the genius of the inventor, who died impoverished, was never officially recognized. / With information from Prensa Latina