The line “You do it to yourself, and that's what really hurts” from “Paranoid Android” is, essentially, a diagnosis one gives oneself. In 1997, Radiohead were still playing rock, but they were already describing a world in which the main source of pain is you. Three years later, they found the perfect timbre for that state—and it turned out to be seven decades older than all of them.
It began with war, as electronic instruments so often do. Maurice Martenot—a French cellist drafted into service as a radio operator—noticed that crossing the frequencies of two military radio generators produced a sound. Pure, sustained, capable of sliding from note to note without steps. Martenot was not an engineer in the strict sense, but that was precisely why he heard a musical voice in technical interference. He spent nearly a decade turning that accident into a controllable instrument, and on April 20, 1928, presented it to the public at the Paris Opera—during a performance of Dimitrios Levidis’s “Poème symphonique.” The instrument was given its creator’s name: the ondes Martenot, “Martenot waves.”
The design that emerged in its mature versions was at once elegant and strange. The musician’s right hand works with two controllers: a keyboard (in later models, 72 keys, each one rocking slightly from side to side to produce lateral vibrato) and a thin wire stretched in front of the keyboard, with a ring worn on the finger. The ring is the secret of the continuous glissando: moving a finger along the wire, the performer smoothly changes the pitch, without discrete steps, without rungs. Meanwhile, the left hand controls a pull-out drawer—the “tiroir”—containing a glass, diamond-shaped volume sensor and waveform switches: sine, triangle, square. Press the glass more softly—the sound is quieter; harder—louder. One careless movement of the left hand, and a note flares up or goes out like a candle in a draft.
But the most unexpected thing is the speakers. One of them, Métallique, uses a small gong instead of an ordinary cone: the sound literally resonates in metal, taking on a ghostly, rattling overtone. Another, Palme, is a resonating chamber with strings tuned to the 12 semitones of the chromatic scale. Sound from the electrical generator is transmitted to the strings, and they begin to vibrate sympathetically, adding acoustic warmth. The instrument is electronic in its source of sound, but acoustic in the way that sound is coloured—and that is its fundamental difference from the synthesizers that would come later. The theremin, with which the ondes Martenot is often confused, is played with hands in the air, without physical contact; here, by contrast, the finger in the ring literally leads the note, the way a bow leads a string.
If Martenot gave the instrument a body, then Olivier Messiaen gave it a repertoire without which the ondes Martenot might have remained an exotic curiosity of Parisian salons. Messiaen heard something in this timbre that neither orchestral winds nor strings could provide: a voice suspended between human singing and a pure electrical tone. As early as 1936–1937, he wrote “Fête des belles eaux” for an ensemble of six ondes Martenot—six identical instruments sounding together like a choir from a parallel universe.
Then came more. “Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine” brought the ondes Martenot into a liturgical context, “Saint François d'Assise” into opera. But the central work that tied the instrument to Messiaen’s name in the public imagination—to the extent that phrase applies to classical music—was the “Turangalîla-Symphonie,” completed in 1949. It is a ten-movement behemoth for large orchestra, piano, and ondes Martenot, in which the instrument plays a role that cannot be reduced either to soloist or orchestral colour. It is a separate layer of reality: hovering over the orchestra, weaving into the tutti, carrying melodic lines too fluid for strings and winds. Messiaen spoke of love and the cosmos, and the ondes Martenot became his voice for states that words describe poorly.
Among the performers who defined the technique was Jeanne Loriod (1928–2001), who wrote the three-volume “Technique de l'Onde Electronique Type Martenot.” It was not merely a textbook, but the codification of an entire school: how to hold the ring, how to control vibrato, how to work the dynamics drawer. Loriod performed ondes Martenot parts in Messiaen’s works for decades, and her interpretations became the benchmark. She died in 2001—the same year Radiohead released “Amnesiac”: one world was receding, another was only beginning to claim its inheritance.
While the academic tradition carefully preserved the ondes Martenot in concert halls, cinema used the instrument more bluntly, but effectively. The timbre Messiaen directed toward the expression of ecstasy became, in the hands of film composers, a sound of anxiety, otherness, desert.
“Lawrence of Arabia” is one of the best-known examples: the ondes Martenot in Maurice Jarre’s score create a sense of scorched space, mirage, distance that cannot be crossed. In “Mars Attacks!” the instrument works toward ironic creepiness. In “Ghostbusters”—creepiness without irony, or at least creepiness with a smile. In the soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” written, incidentally, by Jonny Greenwood, the ondes Martenot would appear as the conscious choice of someone who knew the instrument from the inside.
I have always been surprised that, despite such a cinematic career, the ondes Martenot never became a mass-market instrument. But it all came down to production: the machines were made in small batches, each required manual adjustment, and after Martenot’s death in 1980, manufacturing gradually petered out. By the end of the 20th century, original instruments had become collector’s rarities, and the circle of people able to play them was limited to a handful of specialists connected mainly with the French academic tradition. The instrument was not forgotten—people simply stopped hearing it.
Jonny Greenwood first heard the “Turangalîla-Symphonie” at the age of 15–16. For a guitarist in an Oxford band that had not yet recorded a single album, it was an odd choice—but Greenwood is an odd musician in general. He played viola in a youth orchestra, was interested in Penderecki and Messiaen, and was drawn to things in music that could not be done with six strings. Turangalîla gave him a specific sound—that very voice of the ondes Martenot, sliding and bodily—and that sound lodged inside him for years.
The chronology matters here. During the “OK Computer” period (1997), Greenwood was already experimenting with the ondes Martenot, although the album was remembered above all for its guitar textures, “Paranoid Android,” and its overall atmosphere of technological paranoia. The instrument was there, but it had not yet moved to the foreground—like an actor glimpsed in the background before being given the lead role.
Everything changed with “Kid A” (2000). Radiohead deliberately dismantled their own formula: removed familiar guitar structures, let in drum machines, digital vocal processing, electronic loops. Thom Yorke sang through a vocoder or hid his voice behind layers of effects. And into this environment—cold, disorienting, stripped of familiar rock supports—Greenwood brought the ondes Martenot. A sound that was by then more than seventy years old became the only warm, almost organic element in the digital landscape. The paradox: an instrument from 1928 sounded more modern than synthesizers.
If one track must be chosen in which Radiohead’s ondes Martenot reaches its greatest expressive power, it is “How to Disappear Completely” from “Kid A.” Thom Yorke repeats “I'm not here, this isn't happening”—a mantra of dissociation, of disconnecting from reality. The strings, arranged by Greenwood, create a dense, slowly moving mass. And through that mass breaks the voice of the ondes Martenot—thin, trembling, with the characteristic glissando that is almost impossible to reproduce on another instrument with such a degree of vulnerability.
Why this particular timbre? Because the ondes Martenot sounds like a human voice trying to sing but unable to form a word. The glissando of the ring on the wire is a gesture of the hand, not a key press; it contains physical effort, tremor, imprecision. A synthesizer can reproduce a glide from note to note perfectly, but it will be smooth, inhuman. A theremin gives you gliding pitch, but without contact—a hand in the air, sound responding to distance. The ondes Martenot demands touch: finger in ring, ring on wire, wire pulled taut—and every tiny movement is transmitted into sound. It is an instrument that breathes with the performer.
On “Amnesiac” (2001), recorded in the same sessions as “Kid A,” the instrument appears in “You and Whose Army?”—a track where Yorke whispers into the microphone while the ondes Martenot adds a ghostly line, as though someone were singing along from the next room. In “The National Anthem,” the instrument works differently—it is part of the chaotic orchestral build, one voice in the crowd, yet recognizable as a familiar face in a crush. Later, on “Hail to the Thief” (2003), the ondes Martenot would appear in “Where I End and You Begin”—and the track’s very title seems to describe the nature of the instrument, blurring the boundary between electric and acoustic.
The practical problem Greenwood faced was this: original ondes Martenot were no longer being made. Finding a working example was difficult; taking one on tour was risky—fragile mid-century electronics, tube circuitry, rare components. In 2001, Greenwood commissioned a replica device from the British company Analogue Systems, called the “French Connection.” The crucial detail: the French Connection reproduced the original’s controllers—the keyboard and the ring on the wire—but had no built-in sound generator. In essence, it was an interface: it connected to external synthesizers and controlled them through the gestures characteristic of the ondes Martenot. I like that engineering honesty: copying not the sound, but the way the sound is drawn out. The gesture matters more than the timbre, because a timbre can be found, but the tremor of a finger in a ring cannot be programmed.
That solution allowed Greenwood to use the ondes Martenot’s performance technique in concert without putting an antique instrument at risk. But in the studio he continued to work with the original as well, seeking out the acoustic colouring provided by the speakers—the Métallique gong and the resonant strings of the Palme. No digital emulator can reproduce the effect of an electrical signal making a real metal disc or real strings inside a wooden chamber vibrate. That is physics, not an algorithm.
At the turn of the century, Radiohead were building a sonic world from elements that seemed as though they should not fit together: electronic beats from the Warp Records aesthetic, distorted guitars run through ring modulators, Yorke’s voice processed beyond recognition—and amid all that, the living, analogue, almost vocal timbre of an instrument invented by a former radio operator in interwar France. A contradiction? Rather, a precise calculation.
In Radiohead’s arrangements, the ondes Martenot performed the function traditionally assumed in rock by the voice or the lead guitar: it carried the melodic line, but did so with such timbral ambiguity that the listener could not immediately identify its source. Not a voice—too even. Not a synthesizer—too alive. Not a violin—too electric. The sound exists in the gap between categories, and that is precisely why it suited music that itself existed in a gap—between rock and electronica, between song and sound design, between human and machine.
Roughly speaking, Greenwood used the instrument as emotional glue. The drum machines set the rhythmic grid, the guitars created textural noise, the electronics formed the space—and the ondes Martenot drew a line through all of it that the listener could latch onto. A line that trembled. That tremor is not a metaphor: it literally arises from the physics of the instrument, from the minute movements of the finger in the ring, from the sideways vibrato of the keys.
The instrument became audible again not because it was saved, but because for the first time in decades it could be heard far beyond academic halls. I will not reach for the pretty phrase about being saved from oblivion: it cheapens the decades of work done by academic performers who maintained the tradition while Radiohead did not yet exist. Jeanne Loriod and her students, the orchestras performing Messiaen—they did not need a rock band for validation. The instrument was not forgotten; it was rare and specialized, which—let us agree—is quite another thing.
What Radiohead did is more accurately described by the word “audibility.” A band with an audience of millions placed the timbre of the ondes Martenot in a context accessible to people who would never attend a performance of the Turangalîla-Symphonie. A teenager who bought “Kid A” in 2000 heard that sound and—even without knowing its name—remembered it. It became part of the emotional vocabulary of a generation coming of age at the meeting point of the analogue and digital worlds. Daft Punk used the ondes Martenot on “Random Access Memories” in 2013—an album devoted to nostalgia for analogue sound—and by then the audience already knew that timbre, even if it could not name it.
Why did a voice born from the interference of military radio in the 1920s prove so attuned to the anxiety at the threshold of the digital age? I think it lies in its in-betweenness. The ondes Martenot is an electronic instrument that sounds organic. It is born of technology, but controlled by the body. It is precise, but permits tremor. In a world where digital technology promised infinite control while simultaneously creating a sense of lost contact with reality, that sound became a mirror—electric but warm, precise but uncertain. “You do it to yourself”—you create your own alienation. The instrument invented to turn an electrical signal into song was speaking of exactly that: of the attempt to remain human inside the machine.
Greenwood continues to use the ondes Martenot and the French Connection in Radiohead’s studio and concert work, as well as in his orchestral and film scores. Production of the original instruments has never resumed, though replica projects and digital emulations of varying accuracy do exist. How many working original ondes Martenot remain in the world—no one, it seems, knows for certain.