The first electronic musical devices were developed at the end of the 19th century. During the 1920s and 1930s, some electronic instruments were introduced and the first compositions featuring them were written. By the 1940s, magnetic audio tape allowed musicians to tape sounds and then modify them by changing the tape speed or direction, leading to the development of electroacoustictape music in the 1940s, in Egypt and France. Musique concrète, created in Paris in 1948, was based on editing together recorded fragments of natural and industrial sounds. Music produced solely from electronic generators was first produced in Germany in 1953 by Karlheinz Stockhausen. Electronic music was also created in Japan and the United States beginning in the 1950s and algorithmic composition with computers was first demonstrated in the same decade.
During the 1960s, digital computer music was pioneered, innovation in live electronics took place, and Japanese electronic musical instruments began to influence the music industry. In the early 1970s, Moog synthesizers and drum machines helped popularize synthesized electronic music. The 1970s also saw electronic music begin to have a significant influence on popular music, with the adoption of polyphonic synthesizers, electronic drums, drum machines, and turntables, through the emergence of genres such as disco, krautrock, new wave, synth-pop, hip hop, and EDM. In the early 1980s mass-produced digital synthesizers, such as the Yamaha DX7, became popular, and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) was developed. In the same decade, with a greater reliance on synthesizers and the adoption of programmable drum machines, electronic popular music came to the fore. During the 1990s, with the proliferation of increasingly affordable music technology, electronic music production became an established part of popular culture.[5] In Berlin starting in 1989, the Love Parade became the largest street party with over 1million visitors, inspiring other such popular celebrations of electronic music.[6]
Contemporary electronic music includes many varieties and ranges from experimental art music to popular forms such as electronic dance music. Pop electronic music is most recognizable in its 4/4 form and more connected with the mainstream than preceding forms which were popular in niche markets.[7]
At the turn of the 20th century, experimentation with emerging electronics led to the first electronic musical instruments.[8] These initial inventions were not sold, but were instead used in demonstrations and public performances. The audiences were presented with reproductions of existing music instead of new compositions for the instruments.[9] While some were considered novelties and produced simple tones, the Telharmoniumsynthesized the sound of several orchestral instruments with reasonable precision. It achieved viable public interest and made commercial progress into streaming music through telephone networks.[10]
From the late 1920s, the increased practicality of electronic instruments influenced composers such as Joseph Schillinger and Maria Schuppel to adopt them. They were typically used within orchestras, and most composers wrote parts for the theremin that could otherwise be performed with string instruments.[16]
Developments in early recording technology paralleled that of electronic instruments. The first means of recording and reproducing audio was invented in the late 19th century with the mechanical phonograph.[24] Record players became a common household item, and by the 1920s composers were using them to play short recordings in performances.[25]
The introduction of electrical recording in 1925 was followed by increased experimentation with record players. Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch composed several pieces in 1930 by layering recordings of instruments and vocals at adjusted speeds. Influenced by these techniques, John Cage composed Imaginary Landscape No. 1 in 1939 by adjusting the speeds of recorded tones.[26]
The first practical audio tape recorder was unveiled in 1935.[28] Improvements to the technology were made using the AC biasing technique, which significantly improved recording fidelity.[29][30] As early as 1942, test recordings were being made in stereo.[31] Although these developments were initially confined to Germany, recorders and tapes were brought to the United States following the end of World War II.[32] These were the basis for the first commercially produced tape recorder in 1948.[33]
In 1944, before the use of magnetic tape for compositional purposes, Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh, while still a student in Cairo, used a cumbersome wire recorder to record sounds of an ancient zaar ceremony. Using facilities at the Middle East Radio studios El-Dabh processed the recorded material using reverberation, echo, voltage controls and re-recording. What resulted is believed to be the earliest tape music composition.[34] The resulting work was entitled The Expression of Zaar and it was presented in 1944 at an art gallery event in Cairo. While his initial experiments in tape-based composition were not widely known outside of Egypt at the time, El-Dabh is also known for his later work in electronic music at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in the late 1950s.[35]
Following his work with Studio d'Essai at Radiodiffusion Française (RDF), during the early 1940s, Pierre Schaeffer is credited with originating the theory and practice of musique concrète. In the late 1940s, experiments in sound-based composition using shellac record players were first conducted by Schaeffer. In 1950, the techniques of musique concrete were expanded when magnetic tape machines were used to explore sound manipulation practices such as speed variation (pitch shift) and tape splicing.[36][37]
On 5 October 1948, RDF broadcast Schaeffer's Etude aux chemins de fer. This was the first "movement" of Cinq études de bruits, and marked the beginning of studio realizations[38] and musique concrète (or acousmatic art). Schaeffer employed a disc cutting lathe, four turntables, a four-channel mixer, filters, an echo chamber, and a mobile recording unit. Not long after this, Pierre Henry began collaborating with Schaeffer, a partnership that would have profound and lasting effects on the direction of electronic music. Another associate of Schaeffer, Edgard Varèse, began work on Déserts, a work for chamber orchestra and tape. The tape parts were created at Pierre Schaeffer's studio and were later revised at Columbia University.
In 1950, Schaeffer gave the first public (non-broadcast) concert of musique concrète at the École Normale de Musique de Paris. "Schaeffer used a PA system, several turntables, and mixers. The performance did not go well, as creating live montages with turntables had never been done before."[39] Later that same year, Pierre Henry collaborated with Schaeffer on Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950) the first major work of musique concrete.[40] In Paris in 1951, in what was to become an important worldwide trend, RTF established the first studio for the production of electronic music. Also in 1951, Schaeffer and Henry produced an opera, Orpheus, for concrete sounds and voices.
1954 saw the advent of what would now be considered authentic electric plus acoustic compositions—acoustic instrumentation augmented/accompanied by recordings of manipulated or electronically generated sound. Three major works were premiered that year: Varèse's Déserts, for chamber ensemble and tape sounds, and two works by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky: Rhapsodic Variations for the Louisville Symphony and A Poem in Cycles and Bells, both for orchestra and tape. Because he had been working at Schaeffer's studio, the tape part for Varèse's work contains much more concrete sounds than electronic. "A group made up of wind instruments, percussion and piano alternate with the mutated sounds of factory noises and ship sirens and motors, coming from two loudspeakers."[42]
At the German premiere of Déserts in Hamburg, which was conducted by Bruno Maderna, the tape controls were operated by Karlheinz Stockhausen.[42] The title Déserts suggested to Varèse not only "all physical deserts (of sand, sea, snow, of outer space, of empty streets), but also the deserts in the mind of man; not only those stripped aspects of nature that suggest bareness, aloofness, timelessness, but also that remote inner space no telescope can reach, where man is alone, a world of mystery and essential loneliness."[43]
In Cologne, what would become the most famous electronic music studio in the world, was officially opened at the radio studios of the NWDR in 1953, though it had been in the planning stages as early as 1950 and early compositions were made and broadcast in 1951.[44] The brainchild of Werner Meyer-Eppler, Robert Beyer, and Herbert Eimert (who became its first director), the studio was soon joined by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig. In his 1949 thesis Elektronische Klangerzeugung: Elektronische Musik und Synthetische Sprache, Meyer-Eppler conceived the idea to synthesize music entirely from electronically produced signals; in this way, elektronische Musik was sharply differentiated from French musique concrète, which used sounds recorded from acoustical sources.[45][46]
"With Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel in residence, [Cologne] became a year-round hive of charismatic avant-gardism."[47] on two occasions combining electronically generated sounds with relatively conventional orchestras—in Mixtur (1964) and Hymnen, dritte Region mit Orchester (1967).[48] Stockhausen stated that his listeners had told him his electronic music gave them an experience of "outer space", sensations of flying, or being in a "fantastic dream world".[49]
United States
In the United States, electronic music was being created as early as 1939, when John Cage published Imaginary Landscape, No. 1, using two variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano, and cymbal, but no electronic means of production. Cage composed five more "Imaginary Landscapes" between 1942 and 1952 (one withdrawn), mostly for percussion ensemble, though No. 4 is for twelve radios and No. 5, written in 1952, uses 42 recordings and is to be realized as a magnetic tape. According to Otto Luening, Cage also performed Williams Mix at Donaueschingen in 1954, using eight loudspeakers, three years after his alleged collaboration.[clarification needed]Williams Mix was a success at the Donaueschingen Festival, where it made a "strong impression".[50]
The Music for Magnetic Tape Project was formed by members of the New York School (John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, David Tudor, and Morton Feldman),[51] and lasted three years until 1954. Cage wrote of this collaboration: "In this social darkness, therefore, the work of Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff continues to present a brilliant light, for the reason that at the several points of notation, performance, and audition, action is provocative."[52]
Cage completed Williams Mix in 1953 while working with the Music for Magnetic Tape Project.[53] The group had no permanent facility, and had to rely on borrowed time in commercial sound studios, including the studio of Bebe and Louis Barron.
In the same year Columbia University purchased its first tape recorder—a professional Ampex machine—to record concerts. Vladimir Ussachevsky, who was on the music faculty of Columbia University, was placed in charge of the device, and almost immediately began experimenting with it.
Herbert Russcol writes: "Soon he was intrigued with the new sonorities he could achieve by recording musical instruments and then superimposing them on one another."[54] Ussachevsky said later: "I suddenly realized that the tape recorder could be treated as an instrument of sound transformation."[54] On Thursday, 8 May 1952, Ussachevsky presented several demonstrations of tape music/effects that he created at his Composers Forum, in the McMillin Theatre at Columbia University. These included Transposition, Reverberation, Experiment, Composition, and Underwater Valse. In an interview, he stated: "I presented a few examples of my discovery in a public concert in New York together with other compositions I had written for conventional instruments."[54] Otto Luening, who had attended this concert, remarked: "The equipment at his disposal consisted of an Ampex tape recorder . . . and a simple box-like device designed by the brilliant young engineer, Peter Mauzey, to create feedback, a form of mechanical reverberation. Other equipment was borrowed or purchased with personal funds."[55]
Just three months later, in August 1952, Ussachevsky traveled to Bennington, Vermont, at Luening's invitation to present his experiments. There, the two collaborated on various pieces. Luening described the event: "Equipped with earphones and a flute, I began developing my first tape-recorder composition. Both of us were fluent improvisors and the medium fired our imaginations."[55] They played some early pieces informally at a party, where "a number of composers almost solemnly congratulated us saying, 'This is it' ('it' meaning the music of the future)."[55]
Word quickly reached New York City. Oliver Daniel telephoned and invited the pair to "produce a group of short compositions for the October concert sponsored by the American Composers Alliance and Broadcast Music, Inc., under the direction of Leopold Stokowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After some hesitation, we agreed. . . . Henry Cowell placed his home and studio in Woodstock, New York, at our disposal. With the borrowed equipment in the back of Ussachevsky's car, we left Bennington for Woodstock and stayed two weeks. . . . In late September 1952, the travelling laboratory reached Ussachevsky's living room in New York, where we eventually completed the compositions."[55]
Two months later, on 28 October, Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening presented the first Tape Music concert in the United States. The concert included Luening's Fantasy in Space (1952)—"an impressionistic virtuoso piece"[55] using manipulated recordings of flute—and Low Speed (1952), an "exotic composition that took the flute far below its natural range."[55] Both pieces were created at the home of Henry Cowell in Woodstock, New York. After several concerts caused a sensation in New York City, Ussachevsky and Luening were invited onto a live broadcast of NBC's Today Show to do an interview demonstration—the first televised electroacoustic performance. Luening described the event: "I improvised some [flute] sequences for the tape recorder. Ussachevsky then and there put them through electronic transformations."[56]
In 1929, Nikolai Obukhov invented the "sounding cross" (la croix sonore), comparable to the principle of the theremin.[58] In the 1930s, Nikolai Ananyev invented "sonar", and engineer Alexander Gurov — neoviolena, I. Ilsarov — ilston.,[59]A. Rimsky-Korsakov[ru] and A. Ivanov — emiriton[ru].[58] Composer and inventor Arseny Avraamov was engaged in scientific work on sound synthesis and conducted a number of experiments that would later form the basis of Soviet electro-musical instruments.[60]
In 1956 Vyacheslav Mescherin created the Ensemble of electro-musical instruments[ru], which used theremins, electric harps, electric organs, the first synthesizer in the USSR "Ekvodin",[58] and also created the first Soviet reverb machine. The style in which Meshcherin's ensemble played is known as "Space age pop".[60] In 1957, engineer Igor Simonov assembled a working model of a noise recorder (electroeoliphone), with the help of which it was possible to extract various timbres and consonances of a noise nature.[58] In 1958, Evgeny Murzin designed ANS synthesizer, one of the world's first polyphonic musical synthesizers.
Founded by Murzin in 1966, the Moscow Experimental Electronic Music Studio became the base for a new generation of experimenters – Eduard Artemyev, Alexander Nemtin[ru], Sándor Kallós, Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, and Vladimir Martynov.[58][60] By the end of the 1960s, musical groups playing light electronic music appeared in the USSR. At the state level, this music began to be used to attract foreign tourists to the country and for broadcasting to foreign countries.[61] In the mid-1970s, composer Alexander Zatsepin designed an "orchestrolla" – a modification of the mellotron.[62]
CSIRAC, Australia's first digital computer, displayed at the Melbourne Museum
The world's first computer to play music was CSIRAC, which was designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard. Mathematician Geoff Hill programmed the CSIRAC to play popular musical melodies from the very early 1950s. In 1951 it publicly played the Colonel Bogey March, of which no known recordings exist, only the accurate reconstruction.[63] However, CSIRAC played standard repertoire and was not used to extend musical thinking or composition practice. CSIRAC was never recorded, but the music played was accurately reconstructed. The oldest known recordings of computer-generated music were played by the Ferranti Mark 1 computer, a commercial version of the Baby Machine from the University of Manchester in the autumn of 1951.[64] The music program was written by Christopher Strachey.
The earliest group of electronic musical instruments in Japan, Yamaha Magna Organ was built in 1935.[65] however, after World War II, Japanese composers such as Minao Shibata knew of the development of electronic musical instruments. By the late 1940s, Japanese composers began experimenting with electronic music and institutional sponsorship enabled them to experiment with advanced equipment. Their infusion of Asian music into the emerging genre would eventually support Japan's popularity in the development of music technology several decades later.[66]
Following the foundation of electronics company Sony in 1946, composers Toru Takemitsu and Minao Shibata independently explored possible uses for electronic technology to produce music.[67] Takemitsu had ideas similar to musique concrète, which he was unaware of, while Shibata foresaw the development of synthesizers and predicted a drastic change in music.[68] Sony began producing popular magnetic tape recorders for government and public use.[66][69]
The avant-garde collective Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop), founded in 1950, was offered access to emerging audio technology by Sony. The company hired Toru Takemitsu to demonstrate their tape recorders with compositions and performances of electronic tape music.[70] The first electronic tape pieces by the group were "Toraware no Onna" ("Imprisoned Woman") and "Piece B", composed in 1951 by Kuniharu Akiyama.[71] Many of the electroacoustic tape pieces they produced were used as incidental music for radio, film, and theatre. They also held concerts employing a slide show synchronized with a recorded soundtrack.[72] Composers outside of the Jikken Kōbō, such as Yasushi Akutagawa, Saburo Tominaga, and Shirō Fukai, were also experimenting with radiophonic tape music between 1952 and 1953.[69]
Musique concrète was introduced to Japan by Toshiro Mayuzumi, who was influenced by a Pierre Schaeffer concert. From 1952, he composed tape music pieces for a comedy film, a radio broadcast, and a radio drama.[71][73] However, Schaeffer's concept of sound object was not influential among Japanese composers, who were mainly interested in overcoming the restrictions of human performance.[74] This led to several Japanese electroacoustic musicians making use of serialism and twelve-tone techniques,[74] evident in Yoshirō Irino's 1951 dodecaphonic piece "Concerto da Camera",[73] in the organization of electronic sounds in Mayuzumi's "X, Y, Z for Musique Concrète", and later in Shibata's electronic music by 1956.[75]
Modelling the NWDR studio in Cologne, established an NHK electronic music studio in Tokyo in 1954, which became one of the world's leading electronic music facilities. The NHK electronic music studio was equipped with technologies such as tone-generating and audio processing equipment, recording and radiophonic equipment, ondes Martenot, Monochord and Melochord, sine-wave oscillators, tape recorders, ring modulators, band-pass filters, and four- and eight-channel mixers. Musicians associated with the studio included Toshiro Mayuzumi, Minao Shibata, Joji Yuasa, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Toru Takemitsu. The studio's first electronic compositions were completed in 1955, including Mayuzumi's five-minute pieces "Studie I: Music for Sine Wave by Proportion of Prime Number", "Music for Modulated Wave by Proportion of Prime Number" and "Invention for Square Wave and Sawtooth Wave" produced using the studio's various tone-generating capabilities, and Shibata's 20-minute stereo piece "Musique Concrète for Stereophonic Broadcast".[76][77]
Mid-to-late 1950s
The impact of computers continued in 1956. Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson composed Illiac Suite for string quartet, the first complete work of computer-assisted composition using algorithmic composition. "... Hiller postulated that a computer could be taught the rules of a particular style and then called on to compose accordingly."[78] Later developments included the work of Max Mathews at Bell Laboratories, who developed the influential MUSIC I program in 1957, one of the first computer programs to play electronic music. Vocoder technology was also a major development in this early era. In 1956, Stockhausen composed Gesang der Jünglinge, the first major work of the Cologne studio, based on a text from the Book of Daniel. An important technological development of that year was the invention of the Clavivox synthesizer by Raymond Scott with subassembly by Robert Moog.
In 1957, Kid Baltan (Dick Raaymakers) and Tom Dissevelt released their debut album, Song Of The Second Moon, recorded at the Philips studio in the Netherlands.[79] The public remained interested in the new sounds being created around the world, as can be deduced by the inclusion of Varèse's Poème électronique, which was played over four hundred loudspeakers at the Philips Pavilion of the 1958 Brussels World Fair. That same year, Mauricio Kagel, an Argentine composer, composed Transición II. The work was realized at the WDR studio in Cologne. Two musicians performed on the piano, one in the traditional manner, the other playing on the strings, frame, and case. Two other performers used tape to unite the presentation of live sounds with the future of prerecorded materials from later on and its past of recordings made earlier in the performance.
These were fertile years for electronic music—not just for academia, but for independent artists as synthesizer technology became more accessible. By this time, a strong community of composers and musicians working with new sounds and instruments was established and growing. 1960 witnessed the composition of Luening's Gargoyles for violin and tape as well as the premiere of Stockhausen's Kontakte for electronic sounds, piano, and percussion. This piece existed in two versions—one for 4-channel tape, and the other for tape with human performers. "In Kontakte, Stockhausen abandoned traditional musical form based on linear development and dramatic climax. This new approach, which he termed 'moment form', resembles the 'cinematic splice' techniques in early twentieth-century film."[85]
The theremin had been in use since the 1920s but it attained a degree of popular recognition through its use in science-fiction film soundtrack music in the 1950s (e.g., Bernard Herrmann's classic score for The Day the Earth Stood Still).[86]
Israeli composer Josef Tal at the Electronic Music Studio in Jerusalem (c.1965) with Hugh Le Caine's Creative Tape Recorder (a sound synthesizer) aka "Multi-track"
During the time of the UNESCO fellowship for studies in electronic music (1958) Josef Tal went on a study tour in the US and Canada.[89] He summarized his conclusions in two articles that he submitted to UNESCO.[90] In 1961, he established the Centre for Electronic Music in Israel at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1962, Hugh Le Caine arrived in Jerusalem to install his Creative Tape Recorder in the centre.[91] In the 1990s Tal conducted, together with Dr. Shlomo Markel, in cooperation with the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and the Volkswagen Foundation a research project ('Talmark') aimed at the development of a novel musical notation system for electronic music.[92]
Milton Babbitt composed his first electronic work using the synthesizer—his Composition for Synthesizer (1961)—which he created using the RCA synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.
For Babbitt, the RCA synthesizer was a dream come true for three reasons. First, the ability to pinpoint and control every musical element precisely. Second, the time needed to realize his elaborate serial structures were brought within practical reach. Third, the question was no longer "What are the limits of the human performer?" but rather "What are the limits of human hearing?"[93]
The collaborations also occurred across oceans and continents. In 1961, Ussachevsky invited Varèse to the Columbia-Princeton Studio (CPEMC). Upon arrival, Varese embarked upon a revision of Déserts. He was assisted by Mario Davidovsky and Bülent Arel.[94]
Later, the Center moved to Mills College, directed by Pauline Oliveros, and has since been renamed Center for Contemporary Music.[96]Pietro Grossi was an Italian pioneer of computer composition and tape music, who first experimented with electronic techniques in the early sixties. Grossi was a cellist and composer, born in Venice in 1917. He founded the S 2F M (Studio de Fonologia Musicale di Firenze) in 1963 to experiment with electronic sound and composition.
Simultaneously in San Francisco, composer Stan Shaff and equipment designer Doug McEachern, presented the first "Audium" concert at San Francisco State College (1962), followed by work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1963), conceived of as in time, controlled movement of sound in space. Twelve speakers surrounded the audience, four speakers were mounted on a rotating, mobile-like construction above.[97] In an SFMOMA performance the following year (1964), San Francisco Chronicle music critic Alfred Frankenstein commented, "the possibilities of the space-sound continuum have seldom been so extensively explored".[97] In 1967, the first Audium, a "sound-space continuum" opened, holding weekly performances through 1970. In 1975, enabled by seed money from the National Endowment for the Arts, a new Audium opened, designed floor to ceiling for spatial sound composition and performance.[98] "In contrast, there are composers who manipulated sound space by locating multiple speakers at various locations in a performance space and then switching or panning the sound between the sources. In this approach, the composition of spatial manipulation is dependent on the location of the speakers and usually exploits the acoustical properties of the enclosure. Examples include Varese's Poeme Electronique (tape music performed in the Philips Pavilion of the 1958 World Fair, Brussels) and Stan Schaff's Audium installation, currently active in San Francisco."[99][100] Through weekly programs (over 4,500 in 40 years), Shaff "sculpts" sound, performing now-digitized spatial works live through 176 speakers.[101]
Jean-Jacques Perrey experimented with Schaeffer's techniques on tape loops and was among the first to use the recently released Moog synthesizer developed by Robert Moog. With this instrument he composed some works with Gershon Kingsley and solo.[102] A well-known example of the use of Moog's full-sized Moog modular synthesizer is the 1968 Switched-On Bach album by Wendy Carlos, which triggered a craze for synthesizer music.[103] In 1969 David Tudor brought a Moog modular synthesizer and Ampex tape machines to the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad with the support of the Sarabhai family, forming the foundation of India's first electronic music studio. Here a group of composers Jinraj Joshipura, Gita Sarabhai, SC Sharma, IS Mathur and Atul Desai developed experimental sound compositions between 1969 and 1973.[104]
Musical melodies were first generated by the computer CSIRAC in Australia in 1950. There were newspaper reports from America and England (early and recently) that computers may have played music earlier, but thorough research has debunked these stories as there is no evidence to support the newspaper reports (some of which were obviously speculative). Research has shown that people speculated about computers playing music, possibly because computers would make noises,[105] but there is no evidence that they actually did it.[106][107]
The world's first computer to play music was CSIRAC, which was designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard in the 1950s. Mathematician Geoff Hill programmed the CSIRAC to play popular musical melodies from the very early 1950s. In 1951 it publicly played the "Colonel Bogey March"[108] of which no known recordings exist. However, CSIRAC played standard repertoire and was not used to extend musical thinking or composition practice which is current computer-music practice.
The first music to be performed in England was a performance of the British National Anthem that was programmed by Christopher Strachey on the Ferranti Mark I, late in 1951. Later that year, short extracts of three pieces were recorded there by a BBC outside broadcasting unit: the National Anthem, "Ba, Ba Black Sheep", and "In the Mood" and this is recognised as the earliest recording of a computer to play music. This recording can be heard at this Manchester University site. Researchers at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch declicked and restored this recording in 2016 and the results may be heard on SoundCloud.[109][110][64]
The late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s also saw the development of large mainframe computer synthesis. Starting in 1957, Max Mathews of Bell Labs developed the MUSIC programs, culminating in MUSIC V, a direct digital synthesis language.[111]Laurie Spiegel developed the algorithmic musical composition software "Music Mouse" (1986) for Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari computers.
An important new development was the advent of computers to compose music, as opposed to manipulating or creating sounds. Iannis Xenakis began what is called musique stochastique, or stochastic music, which is a composing method that uses mathematical probability systems. Different probability algorithms were used to create a piece under a set of parameters. Xenakis used computers to compose pieces like ST/4 for string quartet and ST/48 for orchestra (both 1962),[112]Morsima-Amorsima, ST/10, and Atrées. He developed the computer system UPIC for translating graphical images into musical results and composed Mycènes Alpha (1978) with it.
In 1966–1967, Reed Ghazala discovered and began to teach "circuit bending"—the application of the creative short circuit, a process of chance short-circuiting, creating experimental electronic instruments, exploring sonic elements mainly of timbre and with less regard to pitch or rhythm, and influenced by John Cage's aleatoric music[sic] concept.[114]
Cosey Fanni Tutti's performance art and musical career explored the concept of 'acceptable' music and she went on to explore the use of sound as a means of desire or discomfort.[115][failed verification]
Wendy Carlos performed selections from her album Switched-On Bach on stage with a synthesizer with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra; another live performance was with Kurzweil Baroque Ensemble for "Bach at the Beacon" in 1997.[116] In June 2018, Suzanne Ciani released LIVE Quadraphonic, a live album documenting her first solo performance on a Buchla synthesizer in 40 years. It was one of the first quadraphonic vinyl releases in over 30 years.[117]
In the 1950s,[118][119] Japanese electronic musical instruments began influencing the international music industry.[120][121]Ikutaro Kakehashi, who founded Ace Tone in 1960, developed his own version of electronic percussion that had been already popular on the overseas electronic organ.[122] At the 1964 NAMM Show, he revealed it as the R-1 Rhythm Ace, a hand-operated percussion device that played electronic drum sounds manually as the user pushed buttons, in a similar fashion to modern electronic drum pads.[122][123][124]
In 1963, Korg released the Donca-Matic DA-20, an electro-mechanical drum machine.[125] In 1965, Nippon Columbia patented a fully electronic drum machine.[126] Korg released the Donca-Matic DC-11 electronic drum machine in 1966, which they followed with the Korg Mini Pops, which was developed as an option for the Yamaha Electone electric organ.[125] Korg's Stageman and Mini Pops series were notable for "natural metallic percussion" sounds and incorporating controls for drum "breaks and fill-ins."[121]
In 1967, Ace Tone founder Ikutaro Kakehashi patented a preset rhythm-pattern generator using diode matrix circuit[127] similar to the Seeburg's prior U.S. patent 3,358,068 filed in 1964 (See Drum machine#History), which he released as the FR-1 Rhythm Ace drum machine the same year.[122] It offered 16 preset patterns, and four buttons to manually play each instrument sound (cymbal, claves, cowbell and bass drum). The rhythm patterns could also be cascaded together by pushing multiple rhythm buttons simultaneously, and the possible combination of rhythm patterns were more than a hundred.[122] Ace Tone's Rhythm Ace drum machines found their way into popular music from the late 1960s, followed by Korg drum machines in the 1970s.[121] Kakehashi later left Ace Tone and founded Roland Corporation in 1972, with Roland synthesizers and drum machines becoming highly influential for the next several decades.[122] The company would go on to have a big impact on popular music, and do more to shape popular electronic music than any other company.[124]
Turntablism has origins in the invention of direct-drive turntables. Early belt-drive turntables were unsuitable for turntablism, since they had a slow start-up time, and they were prone to wear-and-tear and breakage, as the belt would break from backspin or scratching.[128] The first direct-drive turntable was invented by Shuichi Obata, an engineer at Matsushita (now Panasonic),[129] based in Osaka, Japan. It eliminated belts, and instead employed a motor to directly drive a platter on which a vinyl record rests.[130] In 1969, Matsushita released it as the SP-10,[130] the first direct-drive turntable on the market,[131] and the first in their influential Technics series of turntables.[130] It was succeeded by the Technics SL-1100 and SL-1200 in the early 1970s, and they were widely adopted by hip hop musicians,[130] with the SL-1200 remaining the most widely used turntable in DJ culture for several decades.[132]
Despite the limited electronic equipment available to dub pioneers such as King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry, their experiments in remix culture were musically cutting-edge.[134] King Tubby, for example, was a sound system proprietor and electronics technician, whose small front-room studio in the Waterhouse ghetto of western Kingston was a key site of dub music creation.[137]
In the late 1960s, pop and rock musicians, including the Beach Boys and the Beatles, began to use electronic instruments, like the theremin and Mellotron, to supplement and define their sound. The first bands to utilize the Moog synthesizer would be the Doors on Strange Days[138] as well as the Monkees on Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. In his book Electronic and Experimental Music, Thom Holmes recognises the Beatles' 1966 recording "Tomorrow Never Knows" as the song that "ushered in a new era in the use of electronic music in rock and pop music" due to the band's incorporation of tape loops and reversed and speed-manipulated tape sounds.[139]
Dub music influenced electronic musical techniques later adopted by hip hop music when Jamaican immigrant DJ Kool Herc in the early 1970s introduced Jamaica's sound system culture and dub music techniques to America. One such technique that became popular in hip hop culture was playing two copies of the same record on two turntables in alternation, extending the b-dancers' favorite section.[154] The turntable eventually went on to become the most visible electronic musical instrument, and occasionally the most virtuosic, in the 1980s and 1990s.[135]
Electronic rock was also produced by several Japanese musicians, including Isao Tomita's Electric Samurai: Switched on Rock (1972), which featured Moog synthesizer renditions of contemporary pop and rock songs,[155] and Osamu Kitajima's progressive rock album Benzaiten (1974).[156] The mid-1970s saw the rise of electronic art music musicians such as Jean Michel Jarre, Vangelis, Tomita and Klaus Schulze who were significant influences on the development of new-age music.[151] The hi-tech appeal of these works created for some years the trend of listing the electronic musical equipment employed in the album sleeves, as a distinctive feature. Electronic music began to enter regularly in radio programming and top-sellers charts, as the French band Space with their debut studio album Magic Fly[157] or Jarre with Oxygène.[158] Between 1977 and 1981, Kraftwerk released albums such as Trans-Europe Express, The Man-Machine or Computer World, which influenced subgenres of electronic music.[159]
In this era, the sound of rock musicians like Mike Oldfield and The Alan Parsons Project (who is credited the first rock song to feature a digital vocoder in 1975, The Raven) used to be arranged and blended with electronic effects and/or music as well, which became much more prominent in the mid-1980s. Jeff Wayne achieved a long-lasting success[160] with his 1978 electronic rock musical version of The War of the Worlds.
The definition of MIDI and the development of digital audio made the development of purely electronic sounds much easier,[173] with audio engineers, producers and composers exploring frequently the possibilities of virtually every new model of electronic sound equipment launched by manufacturers. Synth-pop sometimes used synthesizers to replace all other instruments, but it was more common that bands had one or more keyboardists in their line-ups along with guitarists, bassists, and/or drummers. These developments led to the growth of synth-pop, which after it was adopted by the New Romantic movement, allowed synthesizers to dominate the pop and rock music of the early 1980s until the style began to fall from popularity in the mid-to-end of the decade.[172] Along with the aforementioned successful pioneers, key acts included Yazoo, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club, Talk Talk, Japan, and Eurythmics.
Some synth-pop bands created futuristic visual styles of themselves to reinforce the idea of electronic sounds were linked primarily with technology, as Americans Devo and Spaniards Aviador Dro.
Keyboard synthesizers became so common that even heavy metal rock bands, a genre often regarded as the opposite in aesthetics, sound and lifestyle from that of electronic pop artists by fans of both sides, achieved worldwide success with themes as 1983 Jump[174] by Van Halen and 1986 The Final Countdown[175] by Europe, which feature synths prominently.
Proliferation of electronic music research institutions
Elektronmusikstudion[sv] (EMS), formerly known as Electroacoustic Music in Sweden, is the Swedish national centre for electronic music and sound art. The research organisation started in 1964 and is based in Stockholm.
IRCAM at the Place Igor Stravinsky, Paris
STEIM (1969-2021) was a center for research and development of new musical instruments in the electronic performing arts, located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It was founded by Misha Mengelberg, Louis Andriessen, Peter Schat, Dick Raaymakers, Jan van Vlijmen[nl], Reinbert de Leeuw, and Konrad Boehmer. This group of Dutch composers had fought for the reformation of Amsterdam's feudal music structures; they insisted on Bruno Maderna's appointment as musical director of the Concertgebouw Orchestra and enforced the first public fundings for experimental and improvised electronic music in the Netherlands. From 1981-2008, Michel Waisvisz was artistic director, and his live-electronic instruments like the Cracklebox or The Hands inspired international artists to work at STEIM which entertained a residency program since 1992.
IRCAM in Paris became a major center for computer music research and realization and development of the Sogitec 4X computer system,[176] featuring then revolutionary real-time digital signal processing. Pierre Boulez's Répons (1981) for 24 musicians and 6 soloists used the 4X to transform and route soloists to a loudspeaker system.
Barry Vercoe describes one of his experiences with early computer sounds:
Sogitec 4X (c. 1983) at IRCAM machine room in 1989
At IRCAM in Paris in 1982, flutist Larry Beauregard had connected his flute to DiGiugno's 4X audio processor, enabling real-time pitch-following. On a Guggenheim at the time, I extended this concept to real-time score-following with automatic synchronized accompaniment, and over the next two years Larry and I gave numerous demonstrations of the computer as a chamber musician, playing Handel flute sonatas, Boulez's Sonatine for flute and piano and by 1984 my own Synapse II for flute and computer—the first piece ever composed expressly for such a setup. A major challenge was finding the right software constructs to support highly sensitive and responsive accompaniment. All of this was pre-MIDI, but the results were impressive even though heavy doses of tempo rubato would continually surprise my Synthetic Performer. In 1985 we solved the tempo rubato problem by incorporating learning from rehearsals (each time you played this way the machine would get better). We were also now tracking violin, since our brilliant, young flautist had contracted a fatal cancer. Moreover, this version used a new standard called MIDI, and here I was ably assisted by former student Miller Puckette, whose initial concepts for this task he later expanded into a program called MAX.[178]
Released in 1970 by Moog Music, the Mini-Moog was among the first widely available, portable, and relatively affordable synthesizers. It became once the most widely used synthesizer at that time in both popular and electronic art music.[179]Patrick Gleeson, playing live with Herbie Hancock at the beginning of the 1970s, pioneered the use of synthesizers in a touring context, where they were subject to stresses the early machines were not designed for.[180][181]
In 1974, the WDR studio in Cologne acquired an EMS Synthi 100 synthesizer, which many composers used to produce notable electronic works—including Rolf Gehlhaar's Fünf deutsche Tänze (1975), Karlheinz Stockhausen's Sirius (1975–1976), and John McGuire's Pulse Music III (1978).[182]
Thanks to miniaturization of electronics in the 1970s, by the start of the 1980s keyboard synthesizers, became lighter and affordable, integrating into a single slim unit all the necessary audio synthesis electronics and the piano-style keyboard itself, in sharp contrast with the bulky machinery and "cable spaguetty" employed along with the 1960s and 1970s. First, with analog synthesizers, the trend followed with digital synthesizers and samplers as well (see below).
In 1975, the Japanese company Yamaha licensed the algorithms for frequency modulation synthesis (FM synthesis) from John Chowning, who had experimented with it at Stanford University since 1971.[183][184] Yamaha's engineers began adapting Chowning's algorithm for use in a digital synthesizer, adding improvements such as the "key scaling" method to avoid the introduction of distortion that normally occurred in analog systems during frequency modulation.[185]
In 1980, Yamaha eventually released the first FM digital synthesizer, the Yamaha GS-1, but at an expensive price.[186] In 1983, Yamaha introduced the first stand-alone digital synthesizer, the DX7, which also used FM synthesis and would become one of the best-selling synthesizers of all time.[183] The DX7 was known for its recognizable bright tonalities that was partly due to an overachievingsampling rate of 57kHz.[187]
Yamaha DX7, a model for many digital synthesizers of the 1980s
The Korg Poly-800 is a synthesizer released by Korg in 1983. Its initial list price of $795 made it the first fully programmable synthesizer that sold for less than $1000. It had 8-voice polyphony with one Digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) per voice.
The Casio CZ-101 was the first and best-selling phase distortion synthesizer in the CasioCZ line. Released in November 1984, it was one of the first (if not the first) fully programmable polyphonic synthesizers that was available for under $500.
The Roland D-50 is a digital synthesizer produced by Roland and released in April 1987. Its features include subtractive synthesis, on-board effects, a joystick for data manipulation, and an analogue synthesis-styled layout design. The external Roland PG-1000 (1987–1990) programmer could also be attached to the D-50 for more complex manipulation of its sounds.
A sampler is an electronic or digital musical instrument which uses sound recordings (or "samples") of real instrument sounds (e.g., a piano, violin or trumpet), excerpts from recorded songs (e.g., a five-second bass guitar riff from a funk song) or found sounds (e.g., sirens and ocean waves). The samples are loaded or recorded by the user or by a manufacturer. These sounds are then played back using the sampler program itself, a MIDI keyboard, sequencer or another triggering device (e.g., electronic drums) to perform or compose music. Because these samples are usually stored in digital memory, the information can be quickly accessed. A single sample may often be pitch-shifted to different pitches to produce musical scales and chords.
Fairlight CMI (1979–)
Before computer memory-based samplers, musicians used tape replay keyboards, which store recordings on analog tape. When a key is pressed the tape head contacts the moving tape and plays a sound. The Mellotron was the most notable model, used by many groups in the late 1960s and the 1970s, but such systems were expensive and heavy due to the multiple tape mechanisms involved, and the range of the instrument was limited to three octaves at the most. To change sounds a new set of tapes had to be installed in the instrument. The emergence of the digital sampler made sampling far more practical.
The earliest digital sampling was done on the EMS Musys system, developed by Peter Grogono (software), David Cockerell (hardware and interfacing), and Peter Zinovieff (system design and operation) at their London (Putney) Studio c. 1969.
First released in 1977–1978,[188] the Synclavier I using FM synthesis, re-licensed from Yamaha,[189] and sold mostly to universities, proved to be highly influential among both electronic music composers and music producers, including Mike Thorne, an early adopter from the commercial world, due to its versatility, its cutting-edge technology, and distinctive sounds.
The first polyphonic digital sampling synthesizer was the Australian-produced Fairlight CMI, first available in 1979. These early sampling synthesizers used wavetable sample-based synthesis.[190]
In 1980, a group of musicians and music merchants met to standardize an interface that new instruments could use to communicate control instructions with other instruments and computers. This standard was dubbed Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and resulted from a collaboration between leading manufacturers, initially Sequential Circuits, Oberheim, Roland—and later, other participants that included Yamaha, Korg, and Kawai.[191] A paper was authored by Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits and proposed to the Audio Engineering Society in 1981. Then, in August 1983, the MIDI Specification 1.0 was finalized.
MIDI technology allows a single keystroke, control wheel motion, pedal movement, or command from a microcomputer to activate every device in the studio remotely and synchrony, with each device responding according to conditions predetermined by the composer.
MIDI instruments and software made powerful control of sophisticated instruments easily affordable by many studios and individuals. Acoustic sounds became reintegrated into studios via sampling and sampled-ROM-based instruments.
Miller Puckette developed graphic signal-processing software for 4X called Max (after Max Mathews) and later ported it to Macintosh (with Dave Zicarelli extending it for Opcode)[192] for real-time MIDI control, bringing algorithmic composition availability to most composers with modest computer programming background.
The characteristic lo-fi sound of chip music was initially the result of early computer's sound chips and sound cards' technical limitations; however, the sound has since become sought after in its own right.
Synth-pop continued into the late 1980s, with a format that moved closer to dance music, including the work of acts such as British duos Pet Shop Boys, Erasure and The Communards, achieving success along much of the 1990s.
The trend has continued to the present day with modern nightclubs worldwide regularly playing electronic dance music (EDM). Today, electronic dance music has radio stations,[200] websites,[201] and publications like Mixmag dedicated solely to the genre. Despite the industry's attempt to create a specific EDM brand, the initialism remains in use as an umbrella term for multiple genres, including dance-pop, house, techno, electro, and trance, as well as their respective subgenres.[202][203][204] Moreover, the genre has found commercial and cultural significance in the United States and North America, thanks to the wildly popular big room house/EDM sound that has been incorporated into the U.S. pop music[205] and the rise of large-scale commercial raves such as Electric Daisy Carnival, Tomorrowland and Ultra Music Festival.
The category "indie electronic" (or "indietronica")[208] has been used to refer to a wave of groups with roots in independent rock who embraced electronic elements (such as synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, and computer programs) and influences such as early electronic composition, krautrock, synth-pop, and dance music.[209] Recordings are commonly made on laptops using digital audio workstations.[208]
As computer technology has become more accessible and music software has advanced, interacting with music production technology is now possible using means that bear no relationship to traditional musical performance practices:[210] for instance, laptop performance (laptronica),[211]live coding[212][213] and Algorave. In general, the term Live PA refers to any live performance of electronic music, whether with laptops, synthesizers, or other devices.
Beginning around the year 2000, some software-based virtual studio environments emerged, with products such as Propellerhead's Reason and Ableton Live finding popular appeal.[214] Such tools provide viable and cost-effective alternatives to typical hardware-based production studios, and thanks to advances in microprocessor technology, it is now possible to create high-quality music using little more than a single laptop computer. Such advances have democratized music creation,[215] leading to a massive increase in the amount of home-produced electronic music available to the general public via the internet. Software-based instruments and effect units (so-called "plugins") can be incorporated in a computer-based studio using the VST platform. Some of these instruments are more or less exact replicas of existing hardware (such as the Roland D-50, ARP Odyssey, Yamaha DX7, or Korg M1).[citation needed]
Circuit bending
Circuit bending is the modification of battery-powered toys and synthesizers to create new unintended sound effects. It was pioneered by Reed Ghazala in the 1960s and Reed coined the name "circuit bending" in 1992.[216]
Modular synth revival
Following the circuit bending culture, musicians also began to build their own modular synthesizers, causing a renewed interest in the early 1960s designs. Eurorack became a popular system.
↑ "The stuff of electronic music is electrically produced or modified sounds. ... two basic definitions will help put some of the historical discussion in its place: purely electronic music versus electroacoustic music" (Holmes 2002, p.6)
↑ Electroacoustic music may also use electronic effect units to change sounds from the natural world, such as the sound of waves on a beach or bird calls. All types of sounds can be used as source material for this music. Electroacoustic performers and composers use microphones, tape recorders, and digital samplers to make live or recorded music. During live performances, natural sounds are modified in real-time using electronic effects and audio consoles. The source of the sound can be anything from ambient noise (traffic, people talking) and nature sounds to live musicians playing conventional acoustic or electro-acoustic instruments (Holmes 2002, p.8)
↑ "Electronically produced music is part of the mainstream of popular culture. Musical concepts that were once considered radical—the use of environmental sounds, ambient music, turntable music, digital sampling, computer music, the electronic modification of acoustic sounds, and music made from fragments of speech-have now been subsumed by many kinds of popular music. Record store genres including new age, rap, hip-hop, electronica, techno, jazz, and popular song all rely heavily on production values and techniques that originated with classic electronic music" (Holmes 2002, p.1). "By the 1990s, electronic music had penetrated every corner of musical life. It extended from ethereal sound-waves played by esoteric experimenters to the thumping syncopation that accompanies every pop record" (Lebrecht 1996, p.106).
↑ "To present the musical soul of the masses, of the great factories, of the railways, of the transatlantic liners, of the battleships, of the automobiles and airplanes. To add to the great central themes of the musical poem the domain of the machine and the victorious kingdom of Electricity." Quoted in Russcol 1972, p.40.
↑ (Lebrecht 1996, p.75): "... at Northwest German Radio in Cologne (1953), where the term 'electronic music' was coined to distinguish their pure experiments from musique concrete..."
↑ "In 1967, just following the world premiere of Hymnen, Stockhausen said about the electronic music experience: '... Many listeners have projected that strange new music which they experienced—especially in the realm of electronic music—into extraterrestrial space. Even though they are not familiar with it through human experience, they identify it with the fantastic dream world. Several have commented that my electronic music sounds "like on a different star", or "like in outer space." Many have said that when hearing this music, they have sensations as if flying at an infinitely high speed, and then again, as if immobile in an immense space. Thus, extreme words are employed to describe such experience, which is not "objectively" communicable in the sense of an object description, but rather which exist in the subjective fantasy and which are projected into the extraterrestrial space'" (Holmes 2002, p.145).
↑ "Carolyn Brown [Earle Brown's wife] was to dance in Cunningham's company, while Brown himself was to participate in Cage's 'Project for Music for Magnetic Tape.'... funded by Paul Williams (dedicatee of the 1953 Williams Mix), who—like Robert Rauschenberg—was a former student of Black Mountain College, which Cage and Cunnigham had first visited in the summer of 1948" (Johnson 2002, p.20).
↑ "From at least Louis and Bebbe Barron's soundtrack for The Forbidden Planet onwards, electronic music—in particular synthetic timbre—has impersonated alien worlds in film" (Norman 2004, p.32).
1 2 Before the Second World War in Japan, several "electrical" instruments seem already to have been developed (see ja:電子音楽#黎明期), and in 1935 a kind of "electronic" musical instrument, the Yamaha Magna Organ, was developed. It seems to be a multi-timbral keyboard instrument based on electrically blown free reeds with pickups, possibly similar to the electrostatic reed organs developed by Frederick Albert Hoschke in 1934 then manufactured by Everett and Wurlitzer until 1961.
一時代を画する新楽器完成 浜松の青年技師山下氏[An epoch-defining new musical instrument was developed by a young engineer Mr.Yamashita in Hamamatsu]. Hochi Shimbun (in Japanese). 8 June 1935. Archived from the original on 12 March 2012. Retrieved 30 December 2011.
新電氣樂器 マグナオルガンの御紹介[New Electric Musical Instrument – Introduction of the Magna Organ] (in Japanese). Hamamatsu: 日本樂器製造株式會社 (Yamaha). October 1935. 特許第一〇八六六四号, 同 第一一〇〇六八号, 同 第一一一二一六号
↑ "A central figure in post-war electronic art music, Pauline Oliveros [b. 1932] is one of the original members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (along with Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, Terry Riley, and Anthony Martin), which was the resource on the U.S. west coast for electronic music during the 1960s. The Center later moved to Mills College, where she was its first director, and is now called the Center for Contemporary Music." from CD liner notes, "Accordion & Voice", Pauline Oliveros, Record Label: Important, Catalog number IMPREC140: 793447514024.
↑ Doornbusch, Paul. "The Music of CSIRAC". Melbourne School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering. Archived from the original on 18 January 2012.
↑ "This element of embracing errors is at the centre of Circuit Bending, it is about creating sounds that are not supposed to happen and not supposed to be heard (Gard 2004). In terms of musicality, as with electronic art music, it is primarily concerned with timbre and takes little regard for pitch and rhythm in a classical sense. ... . In a similar vein to Cage's aleatoric music, the art of Bending is dependent on chance, when a person prepares to bend they have no idea of the outcome" (Yabsley 2007).
↑ "クロダオルガン修理"[Croda Organ Repair]. CrodaOrganService.com (in Japanese). May 2017. クロダオルガン株式会社(昭和30年 [1955] 創業、2007年に解散)は約50年の歴史のあいだに自社製造のクロダトーン...の販売、設置をおこなってきましたが、[2007]クロダオルガン株式会社廃業...[Kuroda Organ Co., Ltd. (founded in 1955, dissolved in 2007) has been selling and installing its own manufactured Kurodatone ... during about 50 years of history, but [in 2007] the Croda Organ closed business...]
↑ "Vicotor Company of Japan, Ltd.". Diamond's Japan Business Directory (in Japanese). Diamond Lead Company. 1993. p.752. ISBN978-4-924360-01-3. [JVC] Developed Japan's first electronic organ, 1958. Note: the first model by JVC was "EO-4420" in 1958. See also the Japanese Wikipedia article: "w:ja:ビクトロン#機種".
↑ Palmieri, Robert (2004). The Piano: An Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of keyboard instruments (2nded.). Routledge. p.406. ISBN978-1-135-94963-1. the development [and release] in 1959 of an all-transistor Electone electronic organ, first in a successful series of Yamaha electronic instruments. It was a milestone for Japan's music industry.. Note: the first model by Yamaha was "D-1" in 1959."
↑ Shindig (11 June 2022). "Fifty Foot Hose – If Not This Time". Shindig Magazine. Shindig! Media Ltd & Silverback Publishing. Retrieved 26 February 2023.
↑ Craig Miller (14 November 2016). "How a Sound Guru Got From Synthesizers to the Music of Nature". KQED. KQED Inc. Retrieved 19 February 2023. Yes, as in Doctor Bernie Krause, best known today as the dean of the emerging field of soundscape ecology, and one of the chief curators of nature's own music. Few today remember that he also played a seminal role ushering in the synthesizer age. Krause and his music partner, Paul Beaver, turned out to be pioneers in the musical genre that we now call "electronica."
↑ Adam Sweeting (21 September 2016). "Gilli Smyth obituary". The Guardian. Guardian News & Media Limited. Retrieved 26 February 2023. The singer and poet Gilli Smyth, who has died aged 83, co-founded the band Gong in 1967 with her partner Daevid Allen. Smith's pitch-leaping, free-form, often atonal vocal style, which she described as "musical landscaping", became an integral component of Gong's cosmic sound, and over time proved influential on electronica and techno music.
↑ Nicolas Schöffer (December 1983). "Variations sur 600 Structures Sonores – Une nouvelle méthode de composition musicale sur l'ordinateur 4X". Leonardo On-Line (in French). Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST). Archived from the original on 17 April 2012. L'ordinateur nous permet de franchir une nouvelle étape quant à la définition et au codage des sons, et permet de créer des partitions qui dépassent en complexité et en précision les possibilités d'antan. La methode de composition que je propose comporte plusieurs phases et nécessite l'emploi d'une terminologie simple que nous définirons au fur et à mesure: Trames, paves, briques et modules.
↑ "In 1969, a portable version of the studio Moog called the Minimoog Model D, became the most widely used synthesizer in both popular music and electronic art music" Montanaro 2004, p.8.
↑ Sofer & Lynner 1977, p.23 "Yes, I used [ Moog modular equipment ] until I went with Herbie (Hancock) in 1970. Then I used a [ ARP ] 2600 because I couldn't use the Moog on stage. It was too big and cranky; every time we transported it, we would have to pull a module out, and I knew I couldn't do that on the road, so I started using ARP's."
↑ Eric Grunwald (Summer 1994). "Bell Tolls for FM Patent, but Yamaha Sees "New Beginning""(PDF). Stanford Technology Brainstorm. Vol.3, no.2. Office of Technology Licensing (OTL), Stanford University. Archived from the original(PDF) on 5 May 2017. Retrieved 6 October 2017. The technique for synthesizing electronic music, invented by Music Professor John Chowning, brought in over $20 million through an exclusive license to Yamaha Corporation of Japan, which used the technology in its DX-7 synthesizer, enormously popular in the 1980s.
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An electronic musical instrument or electrophone is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic or digital audio signal that ultimately is plugged into a power amplifier which drives a loudspeaker, creating the sound heard by the performer and listener.
Musique concrète is a type of music composition that utilizes recorded sounds as raw material. Sounds are often modified through the application of audio signal processing and tape music techniques, and may be assembled into a form of sound collage. It can feature sounds derived from recordings of musical instruments, the human voice, and the natural environment as well as those created using sound synthesis and computer-based digital signal processing. Compositions in this idiom are not restricted to the normal musical rules of melody, harmony, rhythm, and metre. The technique exploits acousmatic sound, such that sound identities can often be intentionally obscured or appear unconnected to their source cause.
Wendy Carlos is an American musician and composer best known for her electronic music and film scores.
Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist, acoustician and founder of Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC). His innovative work in both the sciences—particularly communications and acoustics—and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end of World War II, as well as his anti-nuclear activism and cultural criticism garnered him widespread recognition in his lifetime.
Digital music technology encompasses the use of digital instruments to produce, perform or record music. These instruments vary, including computers, electronic effects units, software, and digital audio equipment. Digital music technology is used in performance, playback, recording, composition, mixing, analysis and editing of music, by professions in all parts of the music industry.
In music, a loop is a repeating section of sound material. Short sections can be repeated to create ostinato patterns. Longer sections can also be repeated: for example, a player might loop what they play on an entire verse of a song in order to then play along with it, accompanying themselves.
A music sequencer is a device or application software that can record, edit, or play back music, by handling note and performance information in several forms, typically CV/Gate, MIDI, or Open Sound Control, and possibly audio and automation data for digital audio workstations (DAWs) and plug-ins.
In music, tape loops are loops of magnetic tape used to create repetitive, rhythmic musical patterns or dense layers of sound when played on a tape recorder. Originating in the 1940s with the work of Pierre Schaeffer, they were used among contemporary composers of 1950s and 1960s, such as Éliane Radigue, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who used them to create phase patterns, rhythms, textures, and timbres. Popular music authors of 1960s and 1970s, particularly in psychedelic, progressive and ambient genres, used tape loops to accompany their music with innovative sound effects. In the 1980s, analog audio and tape loops with it gave way to digital audio and application of computers to generate and process sound.
Electroacoustic music is a genre of popular and Western art music in which composers use technology to manipulate the timbres of acoustic sounds, sometimes by using audio signal processing, such as reverb or harmonizing, on acoustical instruments. It originated around the middle of the 20th century, following the incorporation of electric sound production into compositional practice. The initial developments in electroacoustic music composition to fixed media during the 20th century are associated with the activities of the Groupe de recherches musicales at the ORTF in Paris, the home of musique concrète, the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, where the focus was on the composition of elektronische Musik, and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City, where tape music, electronic music, and computer music were all explored. Practical electronic music instruments began to appear in the early 20th century.
The Computer Music Center (CMC) at Columbia University is the oldest center for electronic and computer music research in the United States. It was founded in the 1950s as the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.
The RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer was the first programmable electronic synthesizer and the flagship piece of equipment at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Designed by Herbert Belar and Harry Olson at RCA, with contributions by Vladimir Ussachevsky and Peter Mauzey, it was installed at Columbia University in 1957. Consisting of a room-sized array of interconnected sound synthesis components, the Mark II gave the user more flexibility and had twice the number of tone oscillators as its predecessor, the Mark I. The synthesizer was funded by a large grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Halim Abdul Messieh El-Dabh was an Egyptian-American composer, musician, ethnomusicologist, and educator, who had a career spanning six decades. He is particularly known as an early pioneer of electronic music. In 1944 he composed one of the earliest known works of tape music, or musique concrète. From the late 1950s to early 1960s he produced influential work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.
Peter Mauzey, is an electrical engineer associated with the development of electronic music in the 1950s and 1960s at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. He served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University while employed as an engineer at Bell Labs in New Jersey.
Harald Bode was a German engineer and pioneer in the development of electronic musical instruments.
Live electronic music is a form of music that can include traditional electronic sound-generating devices, modified electric musical instruments, hacked sound generating technologies, and computers. Initially the practice developed in reaction to sound-based composition for fixed media such as musique concrète, electronic music and early computer music. Musical improvisation often plays a large role in the performance of this music. The timbres of various sounds may be transformed extensively using devices such as amplifiers, filters, ring modulators and other forms of circuitry. Real-time generation and manipulation of audio using live coding is now commonplace.
The Konkrete Etüde is the earliest work of electroacoustic tape music by Karlheinz Stockhausen, composed in 1952 and lasting just three-and-a-quarter minutes. The composer retrospectively gave it the number "1⁄5" in his catalogue of works.
Canaxis 5 is the only studio album by the Technical Space Composer's Crew, released in 1969 by Music Factory. On later issues, the artist credit was changed to Holger Czukay and Rolf Dammers. The album was remixed for Spoon Records releases and again for the Revisited Rec. release.
In sound and music, an envelope describes how a sound changes over time. For example, a piano key, when struck and held, creates a near-immediate initial sound which gradually decreases in volume to zero. An envelope may relate to elements such as amplitude (volume), frequency or pitch.
The Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio was a facility of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne. It was the first of its kind in the world, and its history reflects the development of electronic music in the second half of the twentieth century.
In music production, the recording studio is often treated as a musical instrument when it plays a significant role in the composition of music. Sometimes called "playing the studio", the approach is typically embodied by artists or producers who favor the creative use of studio technology in record production, as opposed to simply documenting live performances in studio. Techniques include the incorporation of non-musical sounds, overdubbing, tape edits, sound synthesis, audio signal processing, and combining segmented performances (takes) into a unified whole.
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