Technical revolution: from Sudre’s bugle messages to electronic music

The rise of music technologies

From the early nineteenth century—a period often called the age of revolution—people around the world began feeling an urgent need for technological tools. Increasing international travel, growing economic communication, and military demands for long-distance dialog all pushed societies toward technology. This led to systematic research aimed at creating a new, universally understood sign language.

In 1827, François Sudre proposed a three‑note messaging system delivered by military bugles. In his vision, the trumpeter became the message carrier. This same vein of innovation produced Morse’s alphabet, the telegraph, the telephone, the magneto phone, and eventually the gramophone.

Parallel to this technological wave, experimental currents gained force within music. From Schoenberg to Alban Berg and then Anton Webern, compositional approaches such as atonality and the twelve‑tone technique grew more influential. Those innovations did not represent the final word for music—some commentators claimed otherwise—yet they can be understood as opening a path toward a radically new sound, one that broke from what had become the tired homophonic logic of Western harmony.

In 1913 Luigi Russolo stated in his manifesto “The Art of Noises”:

“Once life was quiet. The noise was born in the 19th century with the stepping in of machines.”

Figures like Edgard Varèse (1920) took inspiration from Russolo’s ideas and began producing works shaped by this declaration.

Early electronic instruments

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a wave of electronic instrument inventions answering the needs of experimental composers. The Theremin and the Ondes Martenot appeared around 1920, and in the 1930s the Trautonium followed. Edgard Varèse contributed substantially to the research that took place during these years. His composition Electronic Poem, released in 1958, stands as a significant example of the music emerging in that period.

From gramophone effects to the synthesizer

Very early on, experimenters tried to coax unusual sounds from Edison’s gramophone crank record. These efforts date to before World War II. Electronic music began gaining recognition as a distinct genre only after the war ended.

The earliest synthesizer designs emerged in the 1950s during Milton Babbitt’s experiments with RCA equipment. A practical synthesizer arrived in the 1960s thanks to the work of Don Buchla and Dr. Robert Moog. These devices could generate endless timbres—you could produce, raise, or filter any sound.

The arrival of the synthesizer also carried a symbolic meaning: a move toward what could be called “fretless music.” Music’s future was no longer on a fixed track but followed an unpredictable trajectory.

Polytonality, atonality, and what came next

Early twentieth‑century polytonality gave way to atonal music, and finally to twelve‑tone technique. Some authorities began declaring that “music is over.” Yet the 1920s silenced those claims: composers seized the synthesizer as proving-ground of a new evolutionary direction, showing that music was far from finished.