I.

Introduction

Electronic Music, music that requires the use of electronic devices to produce or manipulate sound during its composition and performance. The sound may be produced entirely through electrical means, as by an electronic sound synthesizer, a complex system of generators that can originate and control sound. Sounds also may be produced by nonelectric means and then altered and combined by electronic devices such as a tape recorder. The essential feature is that electronic devices are necessary in composing. Electronic music is thus distinguishable from music composed in the traditional manner but played on an electronic instrument such as the electronic organ or electric guitar, and from music played through an electronic medium such as a compact disc (CD) player or radio.

II.

Historical Background

Several musicians and engineers imagined electronic instruments. In the early 1900s an Italian composer, Luigi Russolo, imagined music created from noisemaking boxes that would mechanically generate noise. He published a manifesto on the subject in 1913. Around the same time the first electronic music instruments became commercially available. The telharmonium, designed by American inventor Thaddeus Cahill to broadcast over telephone wires, met with little success. But Russian electrical engineer Leon Theremin made successful international tours in the 1920s and 1930s with his instrument, the theremin, based on radio tubes.

The composition of music by electronic means became realistic only after World War II (1939-1945), using technology developed during the war: the tape recorder and the earliest computers. The first significant electronic music was created in 1948 in Paris, where a group of French radio engineers recorded sounds from everyday life on magnetic tape and patched them together in various ways, sometimes purposely distorting the original sounds. These tape-manipulation techniques resulted in a kind of sound montage, which sound engineer and composer Pierre Schaeffer referred to as musique concrète. By this, he meant that he worked with “concrete” sounds rather than with “abstract” sounds represented by notes and other symbols on paper.

Schaeffer’s first experiment in this new genre, Étude aux chemins de fer (1948, Study of Railroads), used recordings of the sounds of trains. His works of the late 1940s and early 1950s were brief sound studies with evocative titles, such as Symphonie pour un homme seul (1949, Symphony for a Man Alone), created with his colleague Pierre Henry. The piece used human sounds, such as breathing, humming, footsteps, and knocking, as well as nonhuman sounds. Together, Schaeffer and Henry helped found an electronic music studio at the radio station ORF. Schaeffer supported his practical experiments in electronic music composition with influential theoretical writings, and his studio attracted several emerging composers, among them French composer Pierre Boulez. French composer Edgard Varèse used Schaeffer’s studio to complete his collage of sounds, Desert (1954).

Similar experiments were conducted in Germany. Physicist Werner Meyer-Eppler, director of the Institute of Phonetics at Bonn University, demonstrated a vocoder in the late 1940s. This device turned human speech into digital sounds and resynthesized the sounds as speech. His theoretical work influenced composers in Cologne who wanted to synthesize sounds through the use of tone generators and other sound-modifying devices. In 1951 a studio to produce electronic music was founded at the West German Radio Station in Cologne. Its director, musicologist Herbert Eimert, promoted serialism as a method of constructing electronic works. In this method, numerically defined rules regulated all aspects of music composition, including pitch, rhythm, and relative volume. At the Cologne studio Italian composer Bruno Maderna and German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, among others, constructed short electronic pieces.

In Europe most early composers of electronic music worked in radio stations, where tape recording equipment was available. A number of European studios for electronic music were established during the 1950s. The most significant were the RAI studio in Milan, founded by Maderna and Italian composer Luciano Berio; the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, The Netherlands; and the EMS studio in Stockholm, Sweden. Various studios also were founded in the United States. In New York City American composer Otto Luening and Russian-born composer Vladimir Ussachevsky worked to create the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center at Columbia University in 1958. Like their colleagues in Europe, Luening and Ussachevsky at first worked with basic tape recording equipment. They recorded sounds of instruments and voices and transformed them through tape manipulation techniques—changing speeds, cutting and splicing, reversing, creating continuous loops, and so forth. Other American composers who worked with tape include John Cage and Steve Reich.

III.

Synthesizers and Other Electronic Technology

In the 1950s sound synthesizers were developed, principally in the United States. Synthesizers enabled composers to produce sounds electronically in almost any range, tone quality, and volume by feeding information about the structure of the sound into a computer. At first composers using synthesizers concentrated on imitating instrumental sounds but in time they began to experiment with producing new sounds. They could create entirely new sounds by layering or mixing many tones in a process called additive synthesis, or they could filter sound by means of subtractive synthesis.

One of the earliest electronic synthesizers was a room-sized RCA computer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. American mathematician and composer Milton Babbitt used it to compose music based on serial principles similar to those of Eimert and Stockhausen in Cologne. Babbitt’s work Philomel (1964) was one of the first to be written for live performer (soprano) and synthesized sounds on tape. The development of computing technology in the 1950s and 1960s led to the establishment of studios specifically concerned with computer music at a number of American universities.

By the mid-1960s American engineers Robert Moog and Donald Buchla had assembled electronic devices to produce what they called modular musical synthesizers. These synthesizers used semiconductor technology rather than vacuum tubes, and they could be controlled by piano-style keyboards or by pressure-sensitive pads. In addition, they could store sounds and reproduce them later. American composer Morton Subotnick used a Buchla synthesizer to create Silver Apples of the Moon (1967), one of the early and influential electronic compositions. By the late 1960s Moog had introduced a smaller, less expensive version of his synthesizer. Over time the number of possible synthesizer keyboards steadily increased, facilitating the production of ever greater and more complex sounds. Synthesizer memory also increased. During the late 1970s and the 1980s synthesizers began to incorporate personal computer technology. Recorded sound samples could then be edited and transformed. The availability of relatively inexpensive synthesizers helped electronic music gain popularity.

Synthesizers that offered a range of preset sounds and effects were used increasingly for commercial purposes, from advertising jingles on television to motion-picture soundtracks. Pink Floyd and other popular music groups also began to use synthesizers during the late 1960s. Moog developed a modernized version of the theremin using transistors; it produces the wailing sounds in the chorus of The Beach Boys’ 1966 hit “Good Vibrations.” But it was composer Wendy (then Walter) Carlos who demonstrated what the synthesizer could do by using one to render fugues and inventions by German composer Johann Sebastian Bach for the album Switched on Bach (1969).

In 1982 synthesizer technology and the creation of electronic music were advanced by the development of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). MIDI is a means of enabling synthesizers to communicate with one another during performance by sending digital instructions. Using MIDI a performer can, for example, arrange for several different synthesizers to respond when a keyboard linked to one synthesizer is played. Computing technology also enabled the invention of the keyboard sampler, an electronic instrument that digitally records small bits, or samples, of sound and then plays them back.

From the 1980s on advances in computer technology also facilitated live electronic performances in which the music is generated or transformed during the performance rather than recorded beforehand. Dutch composer Michel Waisvisz, for example, performs with The Hands, an instrument developed in the mid-1980s that uses sensors and physical touch to generate music. The movement of his hands in space triggers complex sounds and sonic manipulations. American composer and trombonist George Lewis combines trombone improvisation with customized computer composition programs that improvise during the performance. French performance artist Laetitia Sonami controls computer-processed sounds onstage with The Lady’s Glove, an instrument developed in the 1990s that is sensitive to pressure and motion. By the 1990s computers were even able to improvise during performances, using rules developed in advance by the composer.

IV.

Part of the Mainstream

With the arrival of inexpensive personal computers in the late 20th century, the technology for creating music electronically became available to anyone who had a computer. By the 1990s all electronic music involved the use of computers. Many composers regularly used electronic means to listen to and modify pieces as they wrote them. Computer software offered additive and subtractive synthesis and made it easy to create electronic sounds or transform them. Filters used in subtractive synthesis, for example, could be used to accentuate specific pitches or harmonies, to stretch sounds in time, or to raise and lower their pitch. The Internet enabled composers and musicians to freely exchange computer music programs and even recorded sounds. Many composers worked in collaboration with other media, such as video, film, or dance. Electronic music by the year 2000 was no longer a separate branch of modern music but part of the mainstream.