Electronic Music: Instruments, Techniques, and Performers

Origins of Electronic Music

For the most part, electronic music began in the 1950s in Europe, where various governments provided funds for special recording studios to meet the growing demand for new types of music. During this period, the use of tape recorders "became popular and some engineers and composers gathered together various sounds, such as that of machinery, musical instruments, human speech and singing to create completely new forms of musical expression" (Manning 67). At times, tape recorders were sped up to produce higher-pitched sounds or slowed down to create lower-pitched ones. Tape was also run backward so that recorded sounds began and stopped in entirely different ways. Thus, "all of the natural recorded sounds became the raw material to be altered and manipulated with tape equipment" (Howe 89). Sometime later, these new sounds were combined with natural and familiar musical compositions and recordings, ushering in the era of electronic music.

Early Synthesizers and Their Development

The earliest instruments designed to re-create electronic sounds were developed in the 1940s. Generally, these instruments were sound-generating and processing devices that included sources developed in specialized electronic music studios through oscillators, filters, and ring modulators. The first commercial synthesizers were marketed in 1964 by Donald Buchla, who worked independently, alongside composer Milton Subotnick, and by Robert A. Moog, the creator of the famous Moog synthesizer. Soon after, other synthesizers appeared on the market, including ARP, Roland, and Korg, all of which were fundamentally designed in accordance with the synthesizers developed by Robert Moog.

By 1970, in order to meet the need for an electronic instrument suited to concert performance, Moog introduced his Minimoog — "a small console containing a monophonic keyboard (one note played at a time) and a fixed combination of modules, such as envelope, ring, and white noise oscillators" (Mackay 97). In a very short time, this device became popular with rock musicians and led to the introduction of the ARP 2600 and the Odyssey in 1971. The first polyphonic synthesizer (capable of playing two or more notes simultaneously) appeared in the mid-1970s and ranged from the Polymoog (1976) to the more flexible and complex Oberheim, which "contained two, four, six, or even eight individual voices which made it possible to play chords, much like an acoustic piano" (Horn 134).

Bibliography

Appleton, Jon H., ed. The Development and Practice of Electronic Music. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Darter, Tom. The Art of Electronic Music. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1984.

"Electronic Music with the Theremin." Popular Electronics. April 1955: 19–26.

Horn, Delton T. Electronic Music Synthesizers. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Tab Books, 1980.

Howe, Hubert S. Electronic Music Synthesis. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975.

Mackay, Andy. Electronic Music: The Instruments, the Music, the Musicians. Rexdale, ON: Wiley, 1981.

Manning, Peter. Electronic and Computer Music. New York: Oxford University/Clarendon Press, 1993.