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Early in the 1960s, composers in Paris began experimenting with tape recorders to enhance a compositional technique known as musique concrete. Subsequently came synthesizers designed by American Robert Moog which further advanced this genre of composition.
Technological advancements
Technological advances have played a pivotal role in shaping Electronic Music. Musicians can create new sounds and experiment with techniques they would be unable to try without these technologies, as well as connect with their fans via social media, streaming services, virtual reality headsets or augmented reality glasses. All this helps give Electronic Music its own distinct identity.
In 1983, MIDI technology revolutionized the music industry. By enabling instruments to communicate between themselves, this flexible method provided an alternative method of recording entire tracks from scratch and allowed songwriters to modify an entire sound without having to rerecord an entire track – leading to massive growth in sales of electronic musical instruments and software.
Magnetic tape gave musicians in the 1940s access to recording sound and modifying it by altering its speed and direction, leading them to create musique concrete – created from edited-together fragments of natural and industrial sounds – thereby giving birth to musique concrete. By the 1970s, artists such as Suzanne Ciani and Jean-Michel Jarre were using synthesizers to produce electronic music.
Multitrack tape recorders were another technological advance that helped musicians produce music by layering tracks to achieve optimal results and create complex compositions otherwise unimaginable. Furthermore, this multitrack recorder allowed musicians to experiment with various sounds and create new genres of music altogether.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), one of the latest technological breakthroughs, has already had a profound effect on music production and streaming. AIVA, Amper Music, and Jukedeck are some popular AI-powered music creation apps used by both professional composers as well as casual music producers to produce songs effortlessly.
Napster and BitTorrent also revolutionized the music industry through file-sharing websites; though legal, these platforms had an adverse effect by decreasing royalties and sales – though this enabled people to access an unprecedented range of music that reached more people than ever before.
Electronic musical instruments
As music technology advanced, composers began experimenting with electronic instruments that could transform sounds. Edgard Varese’s Poeme electronique from 1958 is one of the earliest examples. Composed from short unrelated sounds including environmental noises such as church bells and voices as well as instrument percussion such as chains rattles drums; bassoon, harpsichord and organ instruments were mixed together into a collage to form one piece of music.
After World War II, electronic music experienced another breakthrough when magnetic tape recording became widely available. This allowed composers to record any sounds they wished and manipulate them post-recording to achieve desired effects – for instance superimposing two sounds onto each other or altering them using filters, reverberation or looped repeating sound patterns – creating new music styles such as musique concrete and ambient.
Leon Theremin first designed his Etherophone (later renamed Theremin), the world’s first instrument designed to be played without touching it, in 1919-1920. Composers like Henry Cowell wrote pieces for it and considered it essential to electronic music development. Coupleux-Givelet synthesizer, invented and displayed at Paris Exposition 1929. It operated much like a player piano, reading an encoded score to control electronic circuits that generated tone waveforms. It was the first instrument ever designed with many of the essential features found on modern electronic musical instruments such as pitch control, tone color/loudness/articulation/tempo control and so forth.
In the 1970s and 80s, synth-pop was an immensely popular genre that relied heavily on electronic musical instruments to produce its sound. Bands such as Ultravox, Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Spandau Ballet became iconic acts with songs featuring synthesizers as their main instrument; due to this rise of this subgenre came numerous music production programs that allowed non-musicians to compose electronic songs more easily and record electronic recordings.
Computer-based music production
Computers have become a mainstay in music production and composition. Most current pop, dance, rock and R&B hits are recorded, mastered and released digitally; vocal autotuning and synthesized accompaniments have become standard features of contemporary hits. Furthermore, computers have revolutionized how music is composed and arranged, enabling composers to quickly produce complex sounds with minimal effort.
Many musicians create music on laptop computers using Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software to arrange and mix sounds. A laptop-based system can provide more cost-effective and portable alternatives than large studios packed with hardware synthesizers; especially useful when creating genres requiring many percussion, bass, or synthesizer sounds.
Electronic music producers often rely on virtual instruments and effects plugins to achieve their desired results. Virtual instruments are software emulators of traditional hardware devices; while effect plugins offer creative effects such as distortion/EQ/delay/reverb and modulation such as phaser/flanger/chorus.
Laptops provide musicians with unparalleled collaboration capabilities beyond sound creation capabilities of DAWs. Being able to share files globally allows musicians easy and fast feedback on tracks they create – improving overall song quality considerably.
CSIR Mark 1, developed in Sydney, Australia during the late 1940s by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, was the first computer to play music. Designed and constructed by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard before programming by Geoffrey Hill, it publicly played “Colonel Bogey March” in 1951 despite not leaving recordings behind.
Early electronic instruments could be complex and costly; later models like the acoustic telegraph (1875) employed more reliable technologies that were easier to use. While designed to transmit music and messages across telephone lines, its huge size and tendency for crosstalk on telephone broadcasts reduced its popularity considerably; its successor, Telharmonium was more successful and eventually one of the earliest musical synthesizers.
Electronic dance music
Electronic dance music (EDM) fuses cutting-edge technological developments to produce state-of-the-art sounds. This genre can be identified by its use of synthesizers, drum machines and computer music production software; disc jockeys often play this music at nightclubs and other venues by way of DJ sets – its sound typically focused around rhythm with beats and bass prominent. Furthermore, vocals or live instrumentation may also feature. Unlike rock and pop genres however, EDM was created for dancing rather than simply listening; unlike rock and pop this genre is designed for dancing rather than simply listening.
Electronic dance music’s roots date back to the 1960s when electronic instruments first came into existence. With the development of devices like the Moog synthesizer and other electronic devices such as synthesizers like those used by The Beatles on Abby Road album as well as others, experimentation became possible and electronic music eventually gained mainstream acceptance.
By the late 1970s, disco and synthpop music had combined into what became known as Electronic Dance Music (EDM). Drum machines and synthesizers had become more prevalent, and innovations such as MIDI allowed for them to communicate between themselves allowing complex rhythms and timbres that came to define this genre.
In England’s rave scene in the 90s was birthplace to numerous influential electronic musicians including The Prodigy, Depeche Mode, Chemical Brothers and Goldie. Since then EDM has spread globally and become part of mainstream culture here in the US – today with artists like Skrillex and Sefa taking it a step further through live coding technology to push its limits further than ever.
At the turn of the 2010s, dubstep and other subgenres of electronic music saw increased popularity in the US due to several factors, including Internet growth and EDM production techniques being applied in hip hop and pop music production techniques. Furthermore, DJs such as Tiesto and David Guetta used their success with dubstep in America to spread it worldwide, while producers/artists like Angerfist, Tubegalore, and Skrillex kept pushing its limits with experimental sound design experiments.