Electronic Music: How Technology Transformed Sound in the 20th Century

Electronic music: technology in service of sound

Electronic music represents one of the great musical adventures of the twentieth century. Musicians have always embraced the latest technological advances — from drawn metal strings that replaced gut, to the mechanical and manufacturing sophistication of the pianoforte that superseded the harpsichord. Every new tool has been used to expand music’s expressive range, and electronic music is no exception. Here, technology has been placed directly at the service of music, and many musical breakthroughs have been made possible only through technological innovation.

Today the phrase “electronic music” is often used interchangeably with dance music or fully synthesized productions. Yet the genre has a history stretching back roughly one hundred years and carries multiple interpretations, all rooted in music produced by electronic means, usually without conventional acoustic instruments.

Electronic instruments began appearing around the turn of the twentieth century as techniques for harnessing electricity grew more sophisticated. The first electronic musical instrument is often credited to Thaddeus Cahill’s Teleharmonium, developed in 1897 and first performed publicly in 1906. However, Elisha Gray’s “Singing Telegraph” from 1876 predates it. The Singing Telegraph used solenoids tuned to vibrate at musical frequencies, triggered by a piano-style keyboard. The Teleharmonium was enormous, requiring several railway boxcars to transport; it was played via two piano-style keyboards and transmitted signals over the telephone network to subscribers.

The most significant early electronic instrument was the Theremin, built in 1917 by Russian inventor Leon Theremin, who also developed the first secret listening bug. Other instruments soon appeared, including the Ondes Martenot and the Trautonium. Initially, these devices were used mainly to perform standard repertoire rather than to forge new forms of musical expression.

The early twentieth century saw radical musical developments, such as those from the Italian Futurists, and major social changes following both world wars helped catalyze later, more adventurous developments in electronic music.

Other early innovations in electronic music during the first half of the twentieth century included montage sound pieces constructed using film with optical soundtrack recording. Composers such as Fritz Walter Bischoff, Arseny Mikhaylovich Avraamov, Yevgeny Sholpo (who drew audio waveforms directly on optical film), Walter Ruttman, and Jack Ellit worked in this medium into the early 1930s. Various composers also incorporated recorded sound via gramophone playback performed alongside orchestras and other instruments.

In 1937, John Cage prophetically published his text Future of Music: CREDO, asserting in part that music would continue to be created with more electronic and “noisy” sounds, such that the future of electronic music would see points of opposition not between harmony and dissonance (as in the past), but between noise and non-noise sounds. In 1939, Cage performed Imaginary Landscape No. 1, the first piece to incorporate live electronics, using variable-speed turntables playing test tones along with muted percussion and piano.

While Halim El-Dabh created the montage piece Ta’abir al-Zaar with recorded sound on a wire recorder in 1944, electronic music truly began in Paris in 1948 with Pierre Schaeffer’s first works of musique concrète: Étude aux Chemins de Fer (railway study), Étude aux Piano (I & II), Étude aux Tourniquets, and Étude aux Casseroles — all made using analog disc playback and presented in a radio concert that October. These pieces were assembled from recordings of everyday sounds, edited into collages. Schaeffer developed a comprehensive theory around what he called sonic objects and concrete music crafted from these recordings.

Composers of electronic music soon realized that traditional structural elements — melody, harmony, and rhythm — were unavailable to express form in electronic works, so they sought alternative approaches. Because electronic music takes sound itself as its fundamental material, timbre became the chief distinguishing factor for shaping a piece’s form. The earliest electronic musicians adapted quickly to this idea and built a new musical language suited to their needs. To this day, electronic art music typically expresses its form through shifts in timbre.

The WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk — West German Radio) Studio für Elektronische Musik was founded in 1951 in Cologne, Germany, by Herbert Eimert, Robert Beyer, and Werner Meyer-Eppler. Karlheinz Stockhausen worked there and produced several significant electronic works in the early and mid-1950s, including Studie I, Studie II, and Gesang der Jünglinge. In contrast to the French practice of constructing music from recordings of real-world sounds, the WDR approach aimed to create pure Elektronische Musik (electronic music) from fundamental sine waves, synthesizing all sounds from scratch. This was partly made possible by the spread of German tape recorder technology after World War II, which enabled overdubbing and re-recording, as well as finer, more sophisticated edits than were feasible with disks.

The 1950s brought many additional significant developments. Electronic music studios emerged in America (Columbia University, the University of Illinois, and Ann Arbor, Michigan), Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Japan, Canada, England, and Chile. CSIRAC became the first computer to play music, and Max Mathews at Bell Labs laid the foundations for computer music. The possibilities of electronic music captured the imagination of many composers and were showcased in the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair. Electronic sounds also appeared in the soundtrack for the film Forbidden Planet by Louis and Bebe Barron, the first film with an electronic music score. Many of the world’s leading composers embraced electronic music, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Edgard Varèse, György Ligeti, John Cage, Luciano Berio, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Luigi Nono, and others. These works still relied on the basics of analog sound synthesis and tape editing of recorded sounds to produce montages.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as electronics became smaller, tape recorders began moving out of specialist studios. Commercial synthesizers, particularly those from Moog, Buchla, and EMS, became widely available. This shift took electronic music out of universities and research departments and into the mainstream. While art-music activity in electronic music continued, popular and jazz musicians incorporated synthesizers into their live performances and used tape-editing techniques in popular record production. Notable examples include Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, and Keith Emerson, as well as Pink Floyd’s

album Dark Side of the Moon. Large parts of disco music also drew on electronic music, and jazz and funk artists such as Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder integrated electronic instruments. Popular exposure to electronic instruments, techniques, and sounds grew through the success of television productions like the BBC’s Doctor Who and the film Star Wars.

At the end of the 1970s, two digital electronic instruments signaled the beginning of the merging of analog electronic music with computer music. The New England Digital Synclavier and the Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument) combined many features of analog synthesizers with the editing capabilities of analog tape. Commercial analog synthesizers needed digital control to easily recall “patches” and settings that would otherwise require several minutes to reset. Manufacturers had been building modular analog synthesizers with separate keyboards, synthesis modules, and sequencers. Users naturally wanted to mix and match components from different manufacturers. As the industry embraced digital control of synthesizers, Sequential Circuits and Roland established the MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) specification in the early 1980s. This revolutionized both analog and digital synthesis and allowed computers to integrate easily with synthesizers.

The 1980s and 1990s saw explosive growth in electronic musical instruments and their use by musicians. The cost-effectiveness of synthesizers and digital samplers gave musicians access to a wider array of sounds and editing capabilities than ever before. Digital emulations of analog equipment and processors made such processing much cheaper and more reliable. The use of digital processing vastly expanded sound manipulation options for electronic musicians, creating new sounds and compositional paradigms such as spectral music.

Meanwhile, advances in the fabrication of digital memory and processing systems greatly enhanced the editing and manipulation potential in computer music and Digital Audio Workstations. GPU developments and new synthesis techniques like granular, physical modeling, and vector synthesis opened up additional electronic musical possibilities.

In the mid-1980s, MIDI allowed control of synthesizers to be separated from sound generation, leading to the development of alternative controllers. These ranged from wind, drum, and guitar controllers that mimicked traditional instruments to specialized and often custom devices such as the Buchla Thunder and gesture-tracking sensor-based instruments pioneered by Michel Waisvisz and Laetitia Sonami. This field has been steadily growing, and in 2002 the first New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference took place. Commercial interest has continued, leading to a wide variety of alternative controllers — from grid-based button sequencers to add-ons for wrists and body parts, specialized bows for string instruments, and camera-based systems that track a performer’s gestures visually.

New Wave bands in the 1980s, alongside Techno and House dance music (which grew out of disco) through the 1990s, continued to expand electronic music’s presence in mainstream culture. As powerful commodity computing became increasingly available, electronic music became easier to produce. Dance music achieved massive popularity in the 1990s, propelled in part by rave culture and the rise of DJ culture.

Today electronic music is everywhere. Most popular music uses tools that trace their roots back to electronic music developments, even if that simply means employing samplers that play back recorded sounds of acoustic instruments or now-typical synthesizer timbres. Some genres, notably electronic dance music, are created entirely electronically, alongside newer practices such as live coding, circuit bending, and chipmusic. The classical experimental tradition persists as well, with musicians using electronic means to search for new sounds and new aesthetics.

Dr. Paul Doornbusch
Australian College of the Arts

Key works of electronic music

• John Cage — Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939)
• Pierre Schaeffer — Cinq études de bruits (includes Étude aux Chemins de Fer) (1948)
• John Cage — Williams Mix (1952)
• Karel Goeyvaerts — Nummer 5 met zuivere tonen (1953)
• Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56)
• Louis and Bebe Barron — Forbidden Planet (1956)
• Edgard Varèse — Poème électronique (1958)
• Iannis Xenakis — Concrèt PH (1958)
• Luciano Berio — Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958–59)
• Kontakte (1958–60)
• Luciano Berio — Visage and Momenti (1960)
• Pauline Oliveros — Sonic Meditations, Teach Yourself to Fly (1961)
• Milton Babbitt — Philomel (1964)
• Luigi Nono — La fabbrica illuminata (1964)
• Mikrophonie I & II (1964 and 1965)
• Hymnen (1966–67)
• Luigi Nono — Contrappunto dialettico alla mente (1968)

• Alvin Lucier — I Am Sitting in a Room (1969)
• James Tenney — For Ann (rising) (1969)
• Mario Davidovsky — Synchronisms No. 6 (1970)
• Françoise Bayle — L’Expérience Acoustique (1972)
• Bernard Parmegiani — De Natura Sonorum (1975)
• Luc Ferrari — Presque Rien N°2
• Trevor Wishart — Red Bird: A Political Prisoner’s Dream
• Iannis Xenakis — La Legende d’Eer
• Jean-Claude Risset — Sud (1985)
• Trevor Wishart — Vox 5 (1986)