No doubt during this Halloween season you'll hear some movie or some recording that has this familiar yet eerie sound. That sound gave birth to the greatest gift from engineers to the arts, the electronic synthesizer. The synthesizer began in the 1920s with Professor Leon Thereman. In a Leningrad engineering lab, he played around with the latest technology radio. It fascinated Thereman because radio changed electricity into sound. He brought two parts of the radio close together so they made a sound like the squeal from putting a microphone to near a speaker. This propelled him in his own words to give these sounds a musical soul. He built an instrument where instead of physically bringing the two parts together, the performer's body would create the squeal. He would just wave his hands in front of the instrument plucking music from the air. He would have likely heard the Thereman as the instrument became known in the 1950s sci-fi classic The Day the Earth stood still. But well before that Thereman toured the world and captured headlines. The New York Times called it ether music. The Chicago Tribune said that Thereman mysteriously reproduces music. Einstein called it as significant as when primitive man produced sound from a bow string. The instrument made quite a splash until 1938 when Thereman disappeared abruptly. Kidnapped by Soviet agents, he was sent to a labor camp until he agreed to work for the KGB. But Leon Thereman had planted a seed in the late 1950s of 14-year-old boy built a Thereman from plans he founded a magazine. By age 20 he began making them commercially selling enough to pay for his engineering education. The student, Robert Mogue, used what he'd learned about electronic music from the Thereman and built in 1964 the world's first synthesizer. With Mogue synthesizer, the child of Leon Thereman's wonderful instrument, electronic music became world famous with one of the best-selling classical albums of all time switched on Bach.