The first electronic musical instrument to achieve public recognition was the Telharmonium, unveiled at the turn of the 20th century, which synthesized the sounds of orchestral instruments with surprising precision using massive electrical machinery. This device, developed by Thaddeus Cahill, did not merely produce simple tones but attempted to recreate the full spectrum of an orchestra, sending music over telephone lines to distant listeners in a primitive form of streaming audio. While early audiences often viewed these inventions as novelties, the Telharmonium achieved commercial progress and sparked a debate among critics about the future of music. Ferruccio Busoni, a prominent composer of the era, encouraged the composition of microtonal music allowed by these new electronic instruments, predicting that machines would play a central role in future music. His influential Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, published in 1907, laid the groundwork for a new relationship between technology and art. Meanwhile, Futurists like Francesco Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo began composing music with acoustic noise to evoke the sound of machinery, arguing in their 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises that the musical soul of the masses lay in the great factories, railways, and battleships. They predicted expansions in timbre allowed by electronics, seeking to add the domain of the machine and the victorious kingdom of Electricity to the great central themes of the musical poem. These early experiments were not sold to the public but were used in demonstrations and public performances, presenting reproductions of existing music rather than new compositions for the instruments.
Tape, Noise, And The Studio
The first practical audio tape recorder was unveiled in 1935, and improvements using AC biasing technology significantly improved recording fidelity, laying the foundation for a new era of composition. In 1944, Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh, while still a student in Cairo, used a cumbersome wire recorder to record sounds of an ancient zaar ceremony. Processing the recorded material using reverberation, echo, voltage controls, and re-recording at the Middle East Radio studios, he created The Expression of Zaar, believed to be the earliest tape music composition. This work was presented in 1944 at an art gallery event in Cairo, though it remained largely unknown outside Egypt at the time. In Paris, Pierre Schaeffer originated the theory and practice of musique concrète, creating music from edited collages of everyday noise. On the 5th of October 1948, Schaeffer broadcast Etude aux chemins de fer, the first movement of Cinq études de bruits, marking the beginning of studio realizations. Schaeffer employed a disc cutting lathe, four turntables, a four-channel mixer, filters, an echo chamber, and a mobile recording unit to create these works. Not long after this, Pierre Henry began collaborating with Schaeffer, a partnership that would have profound and lasting effects on the direction of electronic music. In 1950, Schaeffer gave the first public concert of musique concrète at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, though the performance did not go well as creating live montages with turntables had never been done before. Later that same year, Schaeffer and Henry produced Symphonie pour un homme seul, the first major work of musique concrète. By 1951, the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète was established at RTF in Paris, the ancestor of the ORTF, solidifying the studio as a center for electronic music production.
In Cologne, the WDR studio officially opened in 1953, though it had been in planning stages as early as 1950, and early compositions were made and broadcast in 1951. The brainchild of Werner Meyer-Eppler, Robert Beyer, and Herbert Eimert, the studio was soon joined by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig. In his 1949 thesis Elektronische Klangerzeugung, Meyer-Eppler conceived the idea to synthesize music entirely from electronically produced signals, sharply differentiating elektronische Musik from French musique concrète. In 1953, Stockhausen composed Studie I, followed in 1954 by Elektronische Studie II, the first electronic piece to be published as a score. The studio became a year-round hive of charismatic avant-gardism, with Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel in residence. In the United States, electronic music was being created as early as 1939, when John Cage published Imaginary Landscape No. 1, using two variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano, and cymbal. Cage composed five more Imaginary Landscapes between 1942 and 1952, mostly for percussion ensemble, though No. 4 is for twelve radios and No. 5, written in 1952, uses 42 recordings. The Music for Magnetic Tape Project was formed by members of the New York School, including John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, David Tudor, and Morton Feldman, lasting three years until 1954. In 1952, Vladimir Ussachevsky presented several demonstrations of tape music effects at Columbia University, including Transposition, Reverberation, Experiment, Composition, and Underwater Valse. Just three months later, Ussachevsky traveled to Bennington, Vermont, at Otto Luening's invitation to present his experiments. They played some early pieces informally at a party, where a number of composers almost solemnly congratulated them, saying This is it, meaning the music of the future. Two months later, on the 28th of October, Ussachevsky and Luening presented the first Tape Music concert in the United States, including Luening's Fantasy in Space and Low Speed. The score for Forbidden Planet, by Louis and Bebe Barron, was entirely composed using custom-built electronic circuits and tape recorders in 1956, with no synthesizers in the modern sense of the word.
The Soviet And Japanese Frontiers
In 1929, Nikolai Obukhov invented the sounding cross, comparable to the principle of the theremin, while in the 1930s, Nikolai Ananyev invented sonar and engineer Alexander Gurov created the neoviolena. Composer and inventor Arseny Avraamov was engaged in scientific work on sound synthesis and conducted a number of experiments that would later form the basis of Soviet electro-musical instruments. In 1956, Vyacheslav Mescherin created the Ekvodin, the first synthesizer in the USSR, which used theremins, electric harps, and electric organs, and also created the first Soviet reverb machine. The style in which Meshcherin's ensemble played is known as Space age pop. In 1958, Evgeny Murzin designed the ANS synthesizer, one of the world's first polyphonic musical synthesizers. Founded by Murzin in 1966, the Moscow Experimental Electronic Music Studio became the base for a new generation of experimenters, including Eduard Artemyev, Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, and Vladimir Martynov. By the end of the 1960s, musical groups playing light electronic music appeared in the USSR, and at the state level, this music began to be used to attract foreign tourists to the country and for broadcasting to foreign countries. In Japan, the first model by JVC was the EO-4420 in 1958, and the first model by Yamaha was the D-1 in 1959. Before the Second World War, several electrical instruments had been developed, and in 1935, the Yamaha Magna Organ, an electroacoustic instrument, was built. After World War II, Japanese composers such as Minao Shibata began to learn of the development of electronic musical instruments in other countries. By the late 1940s, Japanese composers began experimenting with electronic music, and institutional sponsorship enabled them to experiment with advanced equipment. The avant-garde collective Jikken Kōbō, founded in 1950, was offered access to emerging audio technology by Sony. The company hired Toru Takemitsu to demonstrate their tape recorders with compositions and performances of electronic tape music. The first electronic tape pieces by the group were Toraware no Onna and Piece B, composed in 1951 by Kuniharu Akiyama. From 1952, Toshiro Mayuzumi composed tape music pieces for a comedy film, a radio broadcast, and a radio drama, introducing musique concrète to Japan. Modelling the NWDR studio in Cologne, an NHK electronic music studio was established by Mayuzumi in Tokyo in 1954, which became one of the world's leading electronic music facilities.
The Computer And The Algorithm
The world's first computer to play music was CSIRAC, designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard in the 1950s. Mathematician Geoff Hill programmed the CSIRAC to play popular musical melodies from the very early 1950s. In 1951, it publicly played the Colonel Bogey March, of which no known recordings exist, only the accurate reconstruction. However, CSIRAC played standard repertoire and was not used to extend musical thinking or composition practice. The first music to be performed in England was a performance of the British National Anthem that was programmed by Christopher Strachey on the Ferranti Mark I, late in 1951. Later that year, short extracts of three pieces were recorded there by a BBC outside broadcasting unit: the National Anthem, Ba, Ba Black Sheep, and In the Mood, recognized as the earliest recording of a computer to play music. In 1956, Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson composed Illiac Suite for string quartet, the first complete work of computer-assisted composition using algorithmic composition. Hiller postulated that a computer could be taught the rules of a particular style and then called on to compose accordingly. Later developments included the work of Max Mathews at Bell Laboratories, who developed the influential MUSIC I program in 1957, one of the first computer programs to play electronic music. In 1958, Columbia-Princeton developed the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer, the first programmable synthesizer. Prominent composers such as Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, Halim El-Dabh, Bülent Arel, and Mario Davidovsky used the RCA Synthesizer extensively in various compositions. One of the most influential composers associated with the early years of the studio was Egypt's Halim El-Dabh, who, after having developed the earliest known electronic tape music in 1944, became more famous for Leiyla and the Poet, a 1959 series of electronic compositions that stood out for its immersion and fusion of electronic and folk music. Iannis Xenakis began what is called musique stochastique, or stochastic music, which is a composing method that uses mathematical probability systems. Different probability algorithms were used to create a piece under a set of parameters. Xenakis used computers to compose pieces like ST/4 for string quartet and ST/48 for orchestra, both in 1962, and developed the computer system UPIC for translating graphical images into musical results.
The Synthesizer And The Pop Revolution
The Moog synthesizer was brought to the mainstream in 1968 by Switched-On Bach, a bestselling album of Bach compositions arranged for Moog synthesizer by American composer Wendy Carlos. The album achieved critical and commercial success, winning the 1970 Grammy Awards for Best Classical Album, Best Classical Performance, and Best Engineered Classical Recording. In 1969, David Borden formed the world's first synthesizer ensemble called the Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company in Ithaca, New York. By the end of the 1960s, the Moog synthesizer took a leading place in the sound of emerging progressive rock with bands including Pink Floyd, Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Genesis making them part of their sound. Instrumental prog rock was particularly significant in continental Europe, allowing bands like Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Can, Neu!, and Faust to circumvent the language barrier. Their synthesizer-heavy krautrock, along with the work of Brian Eno, would be a major influence on subsequent electronic rock. In the late 1960s, pop and rock musicians, including the Beach Boys and the Beatles, began to use electronic instruments, like the theremin and Mellotron, to supplement and define their sound. The first bands to utilize the Moog synthesizer would be the Doors on their 1967 song Strange Days and the Monkees on their album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., also in 1967. The 1969 instrumental Popcorn written by Gershon Kingsley for Music To Moog By became a worldwide success due to the 1972 version made by Hot Butter. In 1970, Moog Music released the Mini-Moog, among the first widely available, portable, and relatively affordable synthesizers. It became once the most widely used synthesizer at that time in both popular and electronic art music. Patrick Gleeson, playing live with Herbie Hancock at the beginning of the 1970s, pioneered the use of synthesizers in a touring context, where they were subject to stresses the early machines were not designed for. By the start of the 1980s, keyboard synthesizers became lighter and affordable, integrating into a single slim unit all the necessary audio synthesis electronics and the piano-style keyboard itself.
Digital Sound And The Dance Floor
In 1975, the Japanese company Yamaha licensed the algorithms for frequency modulation synthesis from John Chowning, who had experimented with it at Stanford University since 1971. Yamaha's engineers began adapting Chowning's algorithm for use in a digital synthesizer, adding improvements such as the key scaling method to avoid the introduction of distortion that normally occurred in analog systems during frequency modulation. In 1980, Yamaha eventually released the first FM digital synthesizer, the Yamaha GS-1, but at an expensive price. In 1983, Yamaha introduced the first stand-alone digital synthesizer, the DX7, which also used FM synthesis and would become one of the best-selling synthesizers of all time. The DX7 was known for its recognizable bright tonalities that was partly due to an overachieving sampling rate of 57 kHz. The Korg Poly-800 is a synthesizer released by Korg in 1983, with an initial list price of $795, making it the first fully programmable synthesizer that sold for less than $1000. The Casio CZ-101 was the first and best-selling phase distortion synthesizer in the Casio CZ line, released in November 1984, one of the first fully programmable polyphonic synthesizers that was available for under $500. The Roland D-50 is a digital synthesizer produced by Roland and released in April 1987, featuring subtractive synthesis, on-board effects, and a joystick for data manipulation. Samplers became a crucial part of this digital revolution, using sound recordings of real instrument sounds, excerpts from recorded songs, or found sounds. The earliest digital sampling was done on the EMS Musys system, developed by Peter Grogono, David Cockerell, and Peter Zinovieff at their London studio around 1969. The first commercially available sampling synthesizer was the Computer Music Melodian by Harry Mendell in 1976. First released in 1977, 1978, the Synclavier I used FM synthesis, re-licensed from Yamaha. In the early 1980s, mass-produced digital synthesizers such as the Yamaha DX7 became popular, which saw development of the MIDI interface. In the same decade, with a greater reliance on synthesizers and the adoption of programmable drum machines, electronic popular music came to the fore. During the 1990s, with the proliferation of increasingly affordable music technology, electronic music production became an established part of popular culture. In Berlin starting in 1989, the Love Parade became the largest street party with over 1 million visitors, inspiring other such popular celebrations of electronic music.
The Global Electronic Landscape
In Jamaica, a form of popular electronic music emerged in the 1960s, dub music, rooted in sound system culture. Dub music was pioneered by studio engineers, such as Sylvan Morris, King Tubby, Errol Thompson, Lee Scratch Perry, and Scientist, producing reggae-influenced experimental music with electronic sound technology. Their experiments included forms of tape-based composition comparable to aspects of musique concrète, an emphasis on repetitive rhythmic structures, the electronic manipulation of spatiality, and the sonic electronic manipulation of pre-recorded musical materials from mass media. King Tubby, for example, was a sound system proprietor and electronics technician, whose small front-room studio in the Waterhouse ghetto of western Kingston was a key site of dub music creation. Despite the limited electronic equipment available to dub pioneers, their experiments in remix culture were musically cutting-edge. In the United States, Jamaican immigrant DJ Kool Herc introduced Jamaica's sound system culture and dub music techniques to America in the early 1970s. One such technique that became popular in hip-hop culture was playing two copies of the same record on two turntables in alternation, extending the b-dancers' favorite section. The turntable eventually went on to become the most visible electronic musical instrument, and occasionally the most virtuosic, in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1970s and 1980s, Wendy Carlos composed the score for A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Tron. In 1977, Gene Page recorded a disco version of the hit theme by John Williams from Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The score of 1978 film Midnight Express composed by Italian synth-pioneer Giorgio Moroder won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1979, as did it again in 1981 the score by Vangelis for Chariots of Fire. Contemporary electronic music includes many varieties and ranges from experimental art music to popular forms such as electronic dance music. In recent years, electronic music has gained popularity in the Middle East, with artists from Iran and Turkey blending traditional instruments with ambient and techno influences. Pop electronic music is most recognizable in its 4/4 form and more connected with the mainstream than preceding forms which were popular in niche markets. By the 1990s, electronic music had penetrated every corner of musical life, extending from ethereal sound-waves played by esoteric experimenters to the thumping syncopation that accompanies every pop record.