This chapter will focus in on technology itself as much as music and will look at the transition in music technology, especially during the second half of the twentieth century, with the gradual introduction and eventual takeover of digital recording and computers. Lest some readers become concerned that this takeover is complete and absolute, let us acknowledge at the outset that the analog remains, from do-it-yourself electronics and circuit bending experiments to the necessity of speakers and microphones.

The story of the move from analog to digital technology is one of accumulating change rather than a single handover point, with a number of salient aspects. First, there was a substantial miniaturization of electronic components in the second half of the twentieth century, following the invention of the transistor (as developed at Bell Labs from 1947, though there are precedents). Second, digital signal processing research earlier in the century gradually made it into practical devices, which came to a head in audio consumer terms around 1982 – the introduction of the CD – but admits pre-cursors much further back. The rise of digital technology also has close links to the rise of the computer following the Second World War, through 1970s video games to a mass market in the 1980s for home computers.

We hope you've found much to engage you in this introduction to electronic music. We could hardly explore every path, but have pointed out a few routes; the further reading and listening suggestions in the chapters will lead you on many interesting musical journeys. The final suggestions for this chapter are a collection of some further alternative histories, theories, ideas, and music to pursue. We'd like to take the opportunity in the paragraphs remaining to us to point to a few further trends and movements in electronic music, perhaps because they were given less attention elsewhere in the book or are worth acknowledging as ongoing sites of scholarship and musical activity.

There is certainly a mass interest in electronic music history, evidenced by articles and programs on electronic music in popular media, and often associated with the avid technology-rich cultures of the present. Retro movements pore over the inspiring examples, and missed opportunities, of the past, spending more time with, say, 8-bit music, than the accelerating technology curve allowed in the 1980s. Enthusiasts collect and restore old equipment; Phil Cirocco describes in great detail a loving restoration of a 1940 Novachord, a romantic adventure in electronics, metal, and wood, set against a peril of “black tar” contamination of the unit by old capacitors. There is a continuing use of legacy equipment, such as in the analog studio room at The Hague's Institute of Sonology, amongst many other institutions keeping alive tape and analog synthesizer tradition. Long-term maintenance is an active issue in the fast-paced technology world, especially for software; open source software has a potentially greater chance of survival, as seen by the long existence of the Music 1 descendant Csound. Propellerheads’ proprietary Rebirth software, originally released in 1997, has been discontinued and is now given tribute in an online museum (www.rebirthmuseum.com), though it has also recently re-appeared in the form of an iPhone app.

At the Eurovision Song Contest in 1980, the synthesizer trio Telex performed Belgium's entry. They appeared, swaying, in dapper scarves, in front of a large unplugged modular synthesizer, and sang a deliberately inane tune, appropriately entitled “Euro-vision.” Typical of the humor of the band, they were aiming for last place and zero points, but were in turn ironically scuppered by Portugal's award of ten points and were dragged into third from last.

Kraftwerk, the rather more famous German synthesizer band, who pioneered the all-synthesizer ensemble as a force in popular music, also had an underlying sense of humor and humanity. Their albums may seem to be continuing the progressive rock tradition of concept albums, taking on such technological themes as Autobahn (1974), Radio-Activity (1975), Trans-Europe Express (1977), The Man-Machine (1978), and Computer World (1981), though they are really tightly prepared and marketed packages. Although some longer tracks appear well beyond the duration of a three-minute pop song, the extended improvisation of the German experimental music scene that Kraftwerk grew out of is left far behind in their more well-known work. Their longer tracks promote a mold of extended dance workouts and minimalist tapestries in pop. Exploring a powerful array of analog and later digital equipment, however rigid the sequencing, they emphasized the human being amongst the technology. Their design harks back to earlier eras, such as the clear link to the film Metropolis (1927) in die-Mensch Maschine, or the doubly meant radio and atomic age of the punning title Radio-Activity.

Having considered the general history of recording, we'll now examine the development of electronic music more intensively up until just before the middle of the twentieth century. Selecting dividing points in historical surveys always involves a degree of arbitrariness, but for our purposes, 1948 provides a useful line, corresponding as it does not only with Schaeffer's first musique concrète studies, but also to signs of the forthcoming post-war economic boom, following a wartime technology push in such areas as communications and computing. The year 1947 had seen the beginning of practical transistor technology, and the first commercial magnetic tape recorders in the US appeared after Bing Crosby's broadcast from tape in November 1947.

In looking at this early period, we'll explore the creation of new instruments and new sounds through nascent electrical technology, jumping around slightly in history to explore different ideas and lines of development. Artistic and commercial measures of success will at times work together and at other times be in conflict. The history of electronic instrument development is an extremely diverse one, presenting many different interfaces: For our purposes, we can consider the interface to be the mechanism(s) via which a performer controls an instrument. We might make a useful distinction between those instruments that make use of, mimic or augment traditional instrumental interfaces (most notably, but not exclusively, the keyboard) and those which explore entirely new ones. The latter category includes some exotic developments indeed and there has been an ongoing debate about questions of accessibility, virtuosity, and expressivity with new interfaces for musical performance. Traditional interfaces (at least potentially) allow for performers to take advantage of existing skills, but at the same time may limit the potential of an instrument by constricting the range of control and expressivity.

Not all experimental electronic music artists are associated with a formalized art world or academia. This chapter explores rich musics that have grown through the enthusiasm and graft of practitioners on the fringes of popular music, or just simply exploring their own path in alternative and underground culture. It would hardly be accurate to call these exponents of experimental electronica popular musicians, since their audiences are certainly not the mass audiences of the pop charts, even though there are sometimes sufficient followers to support distinct niches of activity and a few chief exponents in full-time creation. Further, this chapter will bring together diverse sonic bedfellows that may sit rather uncomfortably alongside one another in their aesthetics, noise music being chief amongst the dissenters. Nonetheless, the historical overlap of the development of these forms often looks back to 1970s counterculture.

The term “electronica” itself was adopted in the US as a marketing umbrella in the late 1990s, particularly to cover electronic dance music acts, and the influence of this on popular music in general (such as Madonna's collaboration with William Orbit on Ray of Light (1998)). In Europe, the term has more generally alluded to electronic music in general (perhaps particularly some of the musics touched on in this chapter, post-1970) and in Latin-derived languages simply means electronic music. We title the chapter “Experimental electronica” to make it clear that the majority of artists considered herein are not exactly mainstream pop musicians, but new experimenters in electronic music. For example, rather than the Cabaret Voltaire of the 1980s, who became more commercially focused, we might prefer to consider the model of Cabaret Voltaire in 1970s Sheffield, primarily concerned with experiment in new sounds.

Welcome to an exploration of electronic music, in many places and many guises. In societies tracking technological developments, the role of electricity in music has had a great impact on musical production and consumption, a musical influence as worldwide as the network of telecommunications. It has changed the balance of the instruments most commonly practiced, for example, toward electric guitars, turntables, and arguably the computer itself, and promoted an emphasis on recordings as the driver of mass musical contact. Yet the transformation has not been total, for traditional activities like live performance have continued in strength, albeit somewhat transfigured by such electronic factors as amplification and the Internet. Participation is not always subservient to passive reception, but is actively encouraged in such instances as musical video games and generative software for mobiles. Acoustic instruments have lost none of their charm and history, though some new history has been written by the interaction of acoustic means and the electrical transformation of sound. There always remains the option of turning off the power, but, unsurprisingly, we won't advocate that step in this book.

The term electronic formally denotes applications of the transistor, a specific electrical component popularized from the mid-twentieth century onward that enables the substantial miniaturization of circuits. Joel Chadabe titles his book on the history of electronic music Electric Music and the best terminology is sometimes contentious. You may see reference to electroacoustic music as an overall term: In the broadest sense, it simply means sound reproduced using electronic means, such as loudspeakers, but can be employed in a more constrained sense of highly designed electronic art music for close listening with an emphasis on space and timbre (more on this later).

Movement and music are inextricably combined; in pre-historic origins and even surviving in some African languages today, the word for music has overlapped with the word for dance. Dance crazes have been a prominent feature of both ephemeral and longer-lasting movements in popular music, whether the Charleston, Twist or Vogue. Much cultural transfer has occurred through music and dance, especially in popular music, through Latin American styles and the African diaspora. Particular dances can reveal surprisingly distant origins; the acrobatics of break-dancing can be traced back before the twentieth century and moonwalking was not invented by Michael Jackson! The human compulsion to dance, whether in couples, groups, or solo, is intimately tied to preferences for clearly regulated, danceable, metronomic music. Electronic perfection of the precision of such metronomic beats, and an ensuing hotbed of dance experiment, seem almost natural in retrospect.

Our working definition is that electronic dance music (EDM) features electronic synthesized and sampled instrumentation, with at least some parts of a percussive nature, in tracks designed for dancing. Track lengths can be greatly extended, well beyond the typical three-minute pop song, and the evocation of a beat varies from the absolutely literal “four on the floor” to more complex rhythmic patterning, including deliberately loose and ragged grooves. The sound materials extend from purer synthesized and sequenced instrumental tracks (techno is one possible label here) to raw sample-based collages with prominent rapped vocals (hip hop, rap), also admitting forays into sung vocal hooks or fully fledged songs. Given that much pop music is simultaneously designed to be effective for listening and clubbing, the musical concerns of EDM flow back and forth with general popular music releases.

Although there have been entire books, numerous journal issues, and countless articles written about sound art, it remains difficult to agree on a single definition. It is worth initially evoking the idea of a publicly visited artwork; it may help to consider the art gallery setting as one common option, where an artist presents an installation work with a significant sound-based element, awaiting visitors to experience it. Yet we shall see a diversity of practices herein beyond this starting point. For the purposes of this chapter, pieces “performed” from beginning to end with an expectation that the audience remain in the space will be generally exempt from the term, as evoking too strongly the art or rock music concert setting.

Issues of definition arise because of the gradual way sound art has come to prominence. Sound art is as much linked to experimental music in the twentieth century, whether Russolo or Cage, as it is to the exploration of alternative media in the fine arts. Not coincidentally, Russolo's involvement with the futurist movement (he was himself a painter) and Cage's New York drinking sessions with abstract expressionists in the early 1950s point to the inter-relations of music and visual arts. The famous conceptual art pioneer Marcel Duchamp had explored change music in Erratum Musical (1913), while Yves Klein anticipated extreme minimalism in his monotone symphony of 1949. But since the middle of the twentieth century, fine artists, more traditionally associated with painting or sculpture, have taken on work in the medium of sound as a possibility for their work; musicians, too, have found themselves working on installations for gallery settings as they have sought to escape the concert hall. The color music of the experimental film makers or the sound synaesthesic pre-occupations of Kandinsky in his abstract art indicate further early connections.

What are the most important landmarks in the popularization of electronic music? Thom Holmes argues that the Philips Pavilion at the World's Fair of 1958 provided the first mass exposure for electronic music, while Andrew Hugill sees this as the apotheosis of Varèse's search through his life for new sound resources. A footfall of two million spectators visited the immersive stomach of the pavilion, hearing Varèse's multimedia work Poème électronique and Xenakis’ filler piece, Concret pH, spread over 350 loudspeakers. Yet, Forbidden Planet (1956), with its “electronic tonalities” created by Louis and Bebe Barron, might lay claim to reaching more people; though a relative box office failure, only making $1.5 million, at 50 cents a ticket, this converts to three million attendees. If we credit theremin-laden B-movies earlier in the 1950s as also stirring some consciousness of electronic music (and the Pavilion experience after all was also a film and light show alongside the music), it seems that we should more widely review the various media in which electronic music technology was appearing, rather than conferring all credit on the Pavilion alone.

There are earlier precedents to electronic music reaching public consciousness, through early electrical instruments, as detailed in Chapter 3. Though the Telharmonium had few listeners in its failed pre-radio restaurant music business, the theremin stirred up headlines and audiences, at least in the heyday of the 1920s. At the close of 1927, reporters clamored to get the first interviews with Lev Termen as his ship approached New York from Europe. The healthy success of the Hammond organ from the 1930s, with its innards of tone wheels and valves rather than traditional air, could be seen as a pre-Second World War watershed of adoption. Nonetheless, the Hammond sound is not so hard to accommodate within existing musical practice, and on this basis of an organ replacement, it was sold to many churches in the US.

After the previous chapter, which spanned some centuries of gradually accelerating activity, we'll slow down our pace and take a look at some developments after the end of the Second World War. This makes sense, as looking forward into the 1950s we see an astonishing number of separate strands develop, each at a fevered pace. The explosion of prosperity and technology after the war created many new possibilities, and the development of electronic music during this period (sometimes referred to as a “golden age”) reflects this.

A world of disparate centers

From the vantage point of today, it is difficult to imagine the world of the 1950s. Although post-war peace efforts such as the establishment of the United Nations (UN) in 1945 were representative of a broad trend toward internationalization, the world remained relatively unconnected by today's standards of instant communication and easy transmission of data. The widespread development of post-office mechanization didn't begin until the mid-1950s. While easier than it had hitherto been and naturally less restricted than during the war, travel was more expensive and less frequent than it is today. For example, although there were domestic flights throughout the US by the 1950s, they would cost around $100 – about $800–$1,000 in 2012 money – and were thus just barely within the reach of ordinary people. Jet travel only became practical in the late 1950s. It was only 1956 that the first transatlantic telephone cable was laid, replacing the previous unreliable and extremely expensive radio telephone service.

Electronic music is a particularly adaptable medium and fluently blends with other art forms; in the previous chapter, we discussed one such hybrid, sound art. In this chapter, we will explore other areas of intersection, from opera to video games, including the intensive new developments in computer music brought about through the Internet. The section headings evoke the varied artistic aspects and paradigms.

In 1849, Richard Wagner used the term “Gesamtkunstwerk” in two essays to describe a “total artwork,” or the combination of many art forms into one. In the 1990s, the term “multimedia” became popularized as any combination of text, graphic art, sound, animation, and video. Technology companies used the term multimedia extensively, and some art historians prefer to use the term “intermedia” to suggest a connection between art forms. Dick Higgins is often credited with the invention of the term “intermedia” in the 1960s, though he himself traced his inspiration back to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Intermedia does not have to include a computational component, but many contemporary artists work with digital tools which make it especially easy to combine art forms. Not all works can be considered Gesamtkunstwerk, or even intermedia; rather, they “exist between, among, and above the genres, rigid categories, and tools solidified by the institutions of culture.”

Recording has captured people as well as sound; Glenn Gould famously retreated to a basement recording studio rather than give another imperfect concert, though the trace of his singing remains indelible on the discs he created there. The relationship of musicians with studios has changed from suspicion and sideline to a central embrace. A few have rejected recording, particularly in scenes of improvised music where location-specific uniqueness is held as key, but even most improvisers have been tempted to record their work for broadcast or release at some stage. Recordings have become a central part of the music business, an international publicity engine for artists as well as a mechanism of archiving. Communication and storage technology means that musical information is easily transferable between cultures and different eras. As the history of electronic music intersects well with the history of recording, most historical electronic music survives documented in recorded form.

Recording technologies

There are precedents to pure audio recording machines. Examples might be found in musical scores, which work like extended memory representations even if they do not hold every detail of reproduction, and the mechanical scores implicit in music boxes, carillons, or the nineteenth-century fad for street organs. More exotic early automata include the floating quartet of robot musicians by the great engineer Al-Jazari, created to entertain a royal drinking party in 1206, and the celebrated flautist and tabor and pipe mechanical players of Jacques Vaucanson (the first from 1738). The home use of player pianos from around 1900 to 1929 in part reflected initial inadequacies of recording quality. Yet a transition occurred from strong bourgeois traditions of home music making to listening mediated by recordings or broadcast (itself increasingly based around recordings): The main part of the twentieth century focused in on a more passive mode of reception for many.

While recent chapters have dealt with aspects of popular culture and electronic music technology, in this one we'll return to some continuing lines of development from the golden age of experimentation in the 1950s described in Chapter 4. But before we dig in, let's pause to spend a moment on the ever-thorny problem of definitions.

Who says we have no class?

What do we mean by the word “classical” in relation to electronic music? It's certainly not a term in common use and seems as if it might allude to the sort of early experimental work we looked at in Chapter 4. However, as the title of the chapter suggests, we'll use the term “classical” here to refer in loose terms to some lines of musical development that can be traced back (perhaps along a somewhat bumpy path) to the traditions of Western art music. As we've seen, much electronic music development has and continues to take place in universities and conservatories associated with classical music, and many important electronic music composers and musicians were trained in such institutions.

That said, as a distinction the term “classical” is not unproblematic. Under its overarching umbrella, a huge variety of styles and approaches can be found; there is also considerable overlap between what we’ll discuss here and material in other chapters. Aspects such as multimedia, sound art, digital sampling, etc., all find their place within the conservatoire electronic music world, itself just one area within a ubiquity of electronic music in the world today. As such, we should keep in mind that we’ll be making only a few stops with in a rough and heterogeneous geographical area, with rather indistinct borders that blur into other domains in surprising ways.