It seems that Dick is borrowing this invention from his other book We Can Build You, which is a sort of a prequel to the Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
In this book, a company that produces regular musical organs is in a bit of trouble:
"Louis," Maury said, "please look what our competitors have done. Electronics may be marching
forward, but without us. Look at the Hammerstein Mood Organ. Look at the Waldteufel Euphoria.
And tell me why anyone would be content like you merely to bang out music.
"No good musical instrument becomes obsolete," I said. But Maury had a point. What had
undone us was the extensive brain-mapping of the mid 1960s and the depth-electrode techniques of
Penfield and Jacobson and Olds, especially their discoveries about the mid-brain. The hypothalamus
is where the emotions lie, and in developing and marketing our electronic organ we had not taken the
hypothalamus into account. The Rosen factory never got in on the transmission of selective frequency short-range shock, which stimulates very specific cells of the mid-brain, and we certainly
failed from the start to see how easy--and important--it would be to turn the circuit switches into a
keyboard of eighty-eight black and whites.
Like most people, I've dabbled at the keys of a Hammerstein Mood Organ, and I enjoy it. But
there's nothing creative about it. True, you can hit on new configurations of brain stimulation, and5
hence produce entirely new emotions in your head which would never otherwise show up there. You
might--theoretically--even hit on the combination that will put you in the state of nirvana. Both the
Hammerstein and Waldteufel corporations have a big prize for that. But that's not music.
There is a reason to believe that "We can build you" is a prequel to "Do androids..." - the main theme of the former book revolves about building "synthetic humans" (which are already used to work on Luna) - or to be precise, electronic version of the American Civil War characters like Abraham Lincoln.
