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Phonograph
Thomas Edison managed to record sound using tinfoil coated cylinder. The device had two needles, one for recording, and one for playback. This video shows a demonstration of a 1903 version of the device. -
Telharmonium/Dynamophone
Thaddeus Cahill patented the Telharmonium/Dynamophone, acknowledged as the earliest musical instrument to generate sound electronically. It used rotating electromagnetic generators to produce electric impulses that were converted into sound by telephone receivers. [This video] 9https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV34h-YCMbE) explains how the device functions. -
Futurist Movement
Initiated by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti with the publication of his Manifesto of Futurist Poetry. This anti-establishment movement focused on breaking boundaries of artistic expression, especially within the realm of technology. Part of this movement, Luigi Russolo used noise-generating instruments called intonarumori to create six different categories of sound, which he outlined in his 1913 text, "The Art of Noises." -
The Rise of Dictatorship in Europe and Russia
The rise of dictatorship in Europe between the wars, especially in Italy, Russia and Germany, was a troubling consequence of the first world war that lead to the eventual atrocities of the second world war, changing the fabric of European culture. -
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First World War
The first world war had a devastating effect on artistic progress, as the structure of society in Europe and beyond changed drastically. Musicians, artists, and inventors were forced to fight, halting funding in the arts, and slowing the progress of technology. -
Theremin
Invented by Leon Theremin around 1920. Two capacitor‐based detectors were employed, one a vertical rod, the other a horizontal loop. These controlled pitch and amplitude, respectively, by generating electrical fields that altered according to the proximity of the hands of the performer. The instrument was the first electronic instrument to be factory-made. [Clara Rockmore]
(youtube.com/watch?v=pSzTPGlNa5U) (1911-1988) was the most famous Theremin performer. -
First Electrical Recording
By late 1924, Bell Telephone Laboratories, lead by Joseph P. Maxfield and Henry C. Harrison had developed an electrical phonograph recording system using a Bell Labs microphone, developed by Edward C. Wente. The first electrical recording was issued in 1925. -
Ondes Martenot
Patented in 1928 by cellist Maurice Martenot, the main interface of the ondes martenot was originally a metal ring, worn on the player's right index finger that, when slid up and down a wire, would create theremin-like sweeps in tone (through oscillations in vacuum tubes). Later, inventor Maurice Martenot added a four-octave keyboard. The instrument has been used in over 100 compositions. -
Magnetophone
The Magnetophone invented in Germany, was a machine that utilized a plastic tape coated with fine ferrous particles. This invention was a notable improvement on the steel tape recorder and heralded the start of a series of technological developments, which led by the end of the Second World War to a compact and versatile recording system, soon to rival the direct disc-cutting methods of the previous era. (Manning, 13) -
Hammond Organ
Electric Organ Invented by Laurens Hammond and John M. Hanert. The method of tone generation involves the rotation of suitably contoured discs within a magnetic field in a manner reminiscent of the Dynamophone. Much more player-friendly than the Ondes Martenot or Theremin, and enduringly successful. This video gives a history of the instrument. -
Music of the Spheres - Johanna Magdalena Beyer
Largely unknown and overlooked during her lifetime, Beyer wrote Music for Spheres as an intended interlude piece for her Opera, Status Quo. This piece is one of the earliest examples of a work intended for purely electronic instruments. The piece was not realized until 1977, after her death. -
Music of the Spheres (cont)
Although Beyer allowed for the work to be played by “three electrical instruments or strings,” the composition is idiomatically electronic; its extreme pitch slides and continually changing dynamics and tempi would be difficult to play accurately on stringed instruments. This is an example of the detrimental effect of female innovators being overlooked throughout history. The realization of this piece shows the depth of imagination in her avant-garde experimentation. -
Imaginary Landscapes No. 1
Imaginary Landscapes No. 1 by John Cage is one of the earliest examples of electroacoustic composition. The piece is for two variable-speed turntables (the first piece to use turntables!) frequency recordings, muted piano, and cymbal. Can be performed via recording or broadcast. The piece uses some processes of indeterminacy, as Cage was working on developing these principles around this time. -
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Second World War
The Second World War had a huge and far-reaching impact on society and technology and actually encouraged innovation through increasing demand for new technologies. The impact of the war and the following years also caused the migration of many artists, especially from Europe and Russia to the United States. A post-war revival of the arts resulted in renewed funding and engagement in the arts. -
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Cold War
The cold war had a lasting global impact, causing a climate of uncertainty in a culturally catastrophic arms race that caused intense tensions between the US and Soviet countries. Cultural events like the Space Race, and McCarthyism were a direct result. The rise of nationalism in the US and Russia as a result of this polarization had a lasting effect on art and culture, as movements like Postmodernism arose in a climate of political unrest. -
Cinq Études de Bruits - Pierre Schaefer
Cinq Études de Bruits were the first pieces of musique concrete. They were presented in a concert in 1948. The most famous of the etudes, "Étude aux Chemins de Fer," uses sounds from trains that Schaefer recorded. Though these pieces are not as compelling as Shaefer's more mature work, they represent his early experiment with tape manipulation, a practice that begot an intensely influential movement. -
Musique Concrete
This movement was initiated by composer Pierre Schaefer, who began to assemble pieces using a tape recorder to assemble fragments of natural and industrial sounds. Musique Concrete emphasizes isolating recorded sounds and treating them through various processes of transformation. Sound objects become divorced from their original context. He began collaborating with Pierre Henry with the backing of Radiodiffusion Television Francais in Paris. -
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Apartheid
The brutal apartheid regime in South Africa was detrimental to the culture and development of the country. The racial violence and suppression led to a broken nation where racial inequality continues to be a problem to this day. Despite this, many South African artists have created hugely impactful art that alludes to this traumatic period of their history. -
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Korean War
The Korean war was an exacerbation of liberalist and communist tensions at the height of the cold war, and the implications of US and Russian involvement made it a significant global event. This war created a precedent for US involvement in Asia, and exacerbated tensions between the US and China. -
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Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement, most active in the US between in the 1950s and 60s, saw civil unrest in the US because of discriminatory laws against black Americans. The subsequent fight for rights paved the way for other marginalized groups, not just locally, but globally. -
Groupe de Musique Concrete, Club d'Essai
This group, later renamed "Group de Recherches Musicales" in a re-organization effort, consisted of Schaeffer, Henry, and Jaques Poullin. They were joined at various points by composers including Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Jean Barraqué, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis. The aesthetic of musique concrete was strictly opposed to the use of electronically generated sound, resulting in conflict with the principles of elektronische musik. -
Music for Magnetic Tape and Williams Mix - John Cage
Though US technology in the arts did not have the same initial boom that Europe did after the war, the Music for Magnetic Tape project was a pioneering collecting of composers including Bebe and Louis Barron, John Cage, Feldman, David Tudor, and Earle Brown, that resulted in the first octophonic music, Williams Mix, composed between 1951 and 1953. -
Williams Mix (cont)
The score for William's Mix is an exhaustive guide of instructions for re-creating a version of the piece, instructing in techniques of cutting, splicing and editing magnetic tape. Cage used the I-Ching as a method of choosing the composing means, and the piece, according to Cage, requires 600 samples. The premiere performance used eight speakers. Two versions have been realized, Cage's, and Tom Erbe's. -
Elektronische Musik
The movement known as Elektronische Musik began to take shape around 1949, but radio studio Westdeutscher Rundfunk opened an electronic music studio officially in 1953. Pioneers of this studio were Werner Meye-Epper and Herbert Eimert, soon joined by Stockhausen (who later became the director) and Gottfried Michael Koenig. The movement itself was at odds with musique concrete, arguing instead for purely electronic production and manipulation of sound. -
Studie I - Stockhausen
Stockhausen composed Studie I as part of a series. This was the first composition to use sine tones. Stockhausen organized Sine tones by whole number ratios. The piece itself is rather unrelenting in its use of thirds and sixths, and his techniques were extended and developed to pave the way for Gesaeng der Junglige, but the piece is important both as a building block to his later work, and its use of sine tones, with subtle timbral change. -
NHK Studio
Influenced by the Cologne studio, the first Japenese studio at the NHK Broadcasting Center in Tokyo. Musicians associated with the studio included Makoto Moroi, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Minao Shibata, Joji Yuasa, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Toru Takemitsu. They had access to many of the same technologies, including sine tone generators, synthesizers, and recording equipment. Stockhausen visited in 1966, and composed Telemusik while he was there. -
RAI
An Italian electronic studio, far less polarized than the Cologne and Paris studios, was established in Milan by Berio and Bruno Maderna, as part of Radio Audizioni Italiane. Berio was vocal in his focus on the development of sound structure and timbre in disregard to exactly how sounds were produced. Other composers involved included Luigi Nono, André Boucourechliev, and Henri Pousser among others. -
Forbidden Planet Soundtrack - Bebe and Louis Barron
Bebe and Louis Barron were pioneers in electronic music. Together, they composed and executed the score for the 1956 sci-fi film, Forbidden Planet. It was the first entirely electronic film score, composed using DIY circuitry inspired in part by Norbert Wiener's 1948 book Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. -
MUSIC
Max Mathew, assisted by Joan Miller at Bell Labs began exploring the use of the computer as a means of synthesizing sound using mathematical principles of waveform calculation. His first attempts consisted of two experimental programs: MUSIC I, which appeared in 1957, followed by MUSIC II in 1958. MUSIC became the first widely used computer program for sound generation. Risset was a pioneering composer within the MUSIC language. -
Poème électronique - Varèse
This seminal piece of musique concrete was written for the 1958 Brusells World Fair. Varèse, who had taken a long hiatus from composition due to lack of adequate technology, was finally able to realize his electroacoustic ambitions with this piece. The performance of the piece at the World Fair was accompanied by a video, lighting design, and over 300 speakers. Spatialization in the music was a key feature, as a complement to Le Corbusier's architecture. -
Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center
Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky formed this center which became the most prominent in the US until its split. They acquired an RCA synthesizer, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. They collaborated with Milton Babbit, who was at Princeton, to form the studios. Other important collaborators included Alice Shields, Pril Smiley, and Davidovsky. -
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Second Wave Feminism (1960s-80s, exact dates unknown).
Spurred by the writings of Simone de Beauvoir and the introduction of contraceptive pills in 1961, 2nd wave feminism swept the US and spread to other parts of the world. This movement, problematic though it was (towards non-white and trans women), was a defining movement of history in terms of women's rights, and culture. Women began to gain more opportunities in the arts and academia. Pioneering feminist composers like Pauline Oliveros paved the way for younger generations. -
San Francisco Tape Music Center
The SF Tape Music Center was founded by Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnik, and Ramon Sender. It would later become part of Mills College. Improvisation and regular concerts were key features of this studio in its early iteration, and key works of Oliveros' like Bye Bye Butterfly were conceived there. -
McGill Electronic Music Studio
This studio has become the most eminent in Canada, and was founded by Istvan Anhalt. Some of the soundtracks for the World's Fair, Expo 67, were created in this studio. Anhalt, Paul Pedersen and Hugh Le Caine taught the electronic music course. In 1969, they obtained a Moog synthesizer. -
The Moog Synthesizer
Invented by Robert Moog, this was the first Voltage-controlled synthesizer. Its oscillators can produce waveforms of different timbres, which can be modulated and filtered to produce more combinations of sounds. Moog's principal innovation was to use voltage to control pitch via a voltage-controlled oscillator. The minimoog was another groundbreaking invention in the 1970s that was portable, and therefore practical for live use. -
Dolby
Ray Dolby was a hugely influential engineer who invented the first system for noise reduction (Dolby A), a key moment in electronic music history. He also helped to improve the sound quality of movies. -
It's Gonna Rain - Steve Reich
This piece is an example of Steve Reich's phasing technique, which he first developed with tape, and subsequently applied to live instruments. It is created by playing the same tape loop on different machines at the same time, which over time will go out of phase due to the slightly different speeds of the tape machines. The sample is a recording of a preacher in Union Square, San Francisco. -
Silver Apples of the Moon - Morton Subotnik
This album demonstrates the voltage-controlled synthesizer designed by Don Buchla, the Buchla 100. Particularly striking is the title track. The record has since gone on to be considered a milestone in electronic music; it was the first album to feature a voltage-based synthesizer and the first piece of both classical and electronic music written specifically for the album format. The album is incredibly aesthetically compelling. -
Digital Tape Recorder
The first digital tape recorder was demonstrated in Tokyo at NHK in 1967, it sampled 30kHz. Japanese company Denon was the first to release commercial digital recordings. The first to be released was Something by Steve Marcus & Jiro Inagaki in 1971. -
Computer Suite from Little Boy - Risset
Risset used MUSIC V to write Little Boy. "I am not
interested in replacing acoustic instruments by bad copies." Risset, like Stockhausen, used whole-number frequency ratios to compose this piece, which features the Shepherd Risset glissando, the endless scale illusion obtained by cyclically repeating a chromatic scale made up of Shepard tones. This is an example of Risset's interest in audio illusions. -
Switched-On Bach - Wendy Carlos
Wendy Carlos, working at the Columbia-Princeton Music Center, helped develop the Moog Synthesizer. Her album Switched-On Bach, a collection of Bach's pieces played on the Moog synthesizer, helped to popularize the instrument, and she won three Grammy Awards for it. She went on to compose the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. -
Stonewall Riots
The Stonewall Riots in the United States began a fight for LGBTQ+ equality, which gained the LGBTQ+ community important rights and protections, and a general wider acceptance in society, though this struggle is ongoing in the US and globally. -
Orsay
Risset introduced computer synthesis in Europe for the first time. He created the European system for the digital synthesis of sounds at Orsay in 1970. -
Cantos de la Creación de la Tierra - Jacqueline Nova
Jacqueline Nova was an important figure in electroacoustic composition in Colombia, despite not always being recognized. in 1967, Jacqueline entered the Torcuato di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires. Cantos de la Creación de la Tierra mixes indigenous chants with experimental electronic sounds. The sounds come from synthesizers, transistors, audio tapes and a sea of cables that linked all the machinery -
Drums - Laurie Spiegel
A pioneer in computer music, Laurie Spiegel wrote Drums in 1975, while working at Bell Labs. She used the interactive GROOVE system that she had been working on with Max Mathews and Emmanual Ghent. "The percussive sounds in the piece come from the sound of individual bits being turned on and off, which were wired out to pulse high-Q resonant filters." -
Neoliberalism on the Rise
From the 1970s-80s, Neoliberalism began to have a comeback, which resulted in huge economic growth in wealthy countries but did not deliver the same prosperities to peripheral countries who were being exploited by them, or the non-wealthy of wealthy countries. Neoliberalism nurtures inequality. -
Speech Songs - Charles Dodge
Dodge, working at Bell Labs, was a pioneer of Dodge was a pioneer of voice-synthesis experiments, culminating in Speech Songs. "I had the opportunity to work at the Bell Labs in the evening, after hours, in an attempt to make music using some of the software there that had been developed for speech research." "It was making music out of the nature of speech itself." These pieces are particularly compelling through use of surrealist poetry. -
New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media
Released by 1750 Arch Records, this album exclusively featured works created by women, including Johanna M. Beyer, Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood, Laurie Spiegel, Megan Roberts, Ruth Anderson, and Laurie Anderson. The album was purposefully not marketed as only women. -
PCM 1
Sony released the first commercial PCM processor for digital audio recording in 1977, aided by Heitaro Nakajima who had formally worked at NHK, Jun Takayama, and Hiroyuki Suzukawa. Recorded files had to be stored on VCR tapes. A VCR and a PCM processor used in combination constituted a digital audio tape recording system. -
Ambient 1: Music for Airports - Brian Eno
Though ambient music had been taking shape since the 60s, this was the album that popularised it. A landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it wasn’t the first ambient album by any means, it was the first album explicitly released as an ‘ambient music album’. The album was essentially a continuation of Eno’s experimentation with the tape machine as a compositional tool, as well as his exploration of generative music. The huge impact of ambient music is ongoing. -
Millefoglie - Barbara Kolk
Millefoglie was commissioned by Pierre Boulez at IRCAM. The work has a high level of structural organization, which Boulez surely would have appreciated. The piece is for nine instruments and computer-generated tape, each section has a different combination of instruments and/or tape, and is meticulously planned. Despite the level of organization, it is hard to actually hear the structure. -
The CD
Sony and Phillips launched the CD to the public in 1981, with a standard sampling rate of 44.1kHz. Though some arguments arose about the difference in sound quality between records and CDs, CDs, were undeniably more practical, both because of their size, and the ability to skip tracks. By 2007, over 200 billion CDs had been bought and sold around the world. The first CD was a 1982 album by Abba called The Visitors. -
IBM Model 5150
IMB introduced the first personal computer (PC) in 1981. The first model was based on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and used Microsoft´s MS-DOS operating system. The IBM PC revolutionized business computing by becoming the first PC to gain widespread adoption by industry. The IBM PC was widely copied and led to the creation of a vast “ecosystem” of software, peripherals, and other commodities for use with the platform. -
MIDI
MIDI was born from a desire to unify the lack of compatibility between manufacturers of synthesizers. MIDI was a collaboration between Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits and Ikutaru Kakehashi of Roland Corporation. MIDI became an industry-standard communications protocol for the control of synthesizers, outcompeting many earlier synthesizers that did not use it. -
SEAMUS
Founded in 1984, a US non-profit national organization that promotes electronic music, with a national conference every year. -
Idle Chatter - Paul Lansky
Idle Chatter is the first of a song cycle of "Chatter" pieces written by Lansky. All of the sounds heard are either micro-samples of the human voice or synthetic extrapolations thereof. The work was created on an IBM 3081 mainframe using punch cards and composed using linear predictive coding, granular synthesis and a variety of stochastic mixing techniques. It was written in a computer language called CMix -
Black Monday
Sudden and severe US stockmarket crash that impacted the global market system. This event had a large-scale effect on trading, and the stock market put various systems in place to prevent further crashes. It took two years to recover. This crash, and the sense of uncertainty it produced led to an increase in hospitalization associated with mental health. -
World Wide Web
Though the internet had been around since the 80s, the invention of the World Wide Web by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee helped to popularize it, becoming the most common means of accessing data online in the form of websites and hyperlinks. This served as a crucial step in developing the vast trove of information that most of us now access on a daily basis. -
DigiDesign ProTools
ProTools began in its earliest iteration in the 80s, with SoundDesigner, its precursor. A multitrack version, called ProTools, was first released in 1991 and improved upon in every subsequent version. -
The End of the Cold War
The cold war ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved. What followed was a period of technological progression, which heralded the age of information and technology. Trade between the US and the Eastern Bloc increased, and globalization became increasingly prevalent, with the standard of living increasing as a global average (although definitely more in some places than others.) -
Hothouse - Paul Koonce
Hothouse is an example of Koonce's painstaking attention to detail. Koonce manipulates familiar sounds over a process of enharmonic change, resulting in fluctuation of texture, and the transformation of sound objects from the familiar to the unfamiliar. -
The EU
The EU was formed in 1993 in Maastrict. The EU promotes cooperation between member states, and calls for unified responses. The EU has been a dominant financial center since its inception and has given rise to ideas about a similar union in parts of Africa. -
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DAW
Rapid developments in computer technology meant that by the mid-1990s, Digital Audio Workstations had become much more advanced, in tandem with development of personal computers and new software and integrated hardware. Early versions of Logic, Protools, and other software were available. Windows 95 accelerated this process. Plug-ins were developed -
MAX/Msp
The Cycling' 74 version of MAX was released in 1996, after the program had been developed by Miller Puckette and IRCAM in the 80s. -
Supercollider
James McCarthy first released SuperCollider in 1996. It was then released for free in 2002, and now is widely accessible and maintained by people who use it. It is a programming environment and language that you can run in the terminal of a Mac or Unix environment that allows for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. -
Custer and Sitting Bull - Kyle Gann
"I had to enter every MIDI note in an early sequencing program called Voyetra Plus, in which you could only see one measure at a time. For the gradual deceleration at the end I had to calculate the note lengths to every 480th of a beat in an old math software called Basic, and I ran the MIDI files through three Alexis synthesizers, which were the best reasonably priced returnable synths at the time." - Kyle Gann on his electronic opera. -
Meta-Orchestra
A precursor to the Laptop Orchestra, the Meta-Orchestra began in 2000 as a European Community funded project dedicated to researching the collaborative use of computer technologies and
networks in a performance environment of electronically extended instruments. This project was an ensemble and collective dedicated to creating music with the use of technology. It was formed in Dartington, with two further meetings and performances, and had its own manifesto. -
9/11
The 9/11 attacks represent an intense cultural shift in the United States which had a far-reaching global impact. As well as changing culture domestically in the form of a resurgence of patriotism, the so-called "War on Terror," has been used as a catch-all excuse for the US to go to war with the Middle East, dragging other countries with it because it is such a dominant global power. It is devastating to see the cultural landmarks that have been destroyed in Yemen, for example. -
Ableton Live
Gerhard Behles and Robert Henke founded Ableton in the 90s. They were in a techno group in Germany and had a need for a software program to use in their live performance. It is a user-friendly software which is used widely in popular and classical music as an audio-editing and live performance tool. -
System Test (Fire and Ice) - Maggi Payne
This piece is an audiovisual piece. "There is such a powerful intensity in the discharges, accompanied by a wonderful sizzling, hissing, crackling sounds, and powerful low frequencies; the danger is always present. The sources are convolved, stretched, granulated, eq'd and further processed many times over, then whirled into this intense piece." - Payne -
Dreams in the Desert - Ellainie Lillios
Dreams in the Desert was realized in 2001 at the Bowling Green State University Electroacoustic Studios and in the composer’s home studio in Bowling Green. It was premiered in 2008. The piece is a fixed-media stereo piece that shows Lillios' acousmatic influence, with recognizable sounds like water and crushed ice being treated through careful loudspeaker projection and timbre modifications. The piece feels programmatic in its fantasy audio description of a desert. -
Tsunami
The Tsunami of 2004, caused by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, is the most devastating tsunami in modern times, affecting 18 countries in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa, killing more than 250,000 people in a single day, and leaving more than 1.7 million homeless. It served as a reminder of the Global power imbalance in the world, and the detrimental effects of climate change. -
PLOrk
The Princeton Laptop Orchestra was the first of its kind. PLOrk was co-founded in 2005 by Perry Cook, Dan Trueman, Scott Smallwood, and Ge Wang. They have commissioned works by a number of composers, including Pauline Oliveros, and Paul Lansky. PLOrk has made extensive use of ChucK, a new music programming language created by Ge Wang and Perry Cook which allows the performers to develop new code both in preparation and in performance. -
YouTube
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim created YouTube while working at PayPal. Although a video streaming service, YouTube was also a way to share audio easily, and was the precursor to music databases like Spotify and Apple Music, which have changed the music industry irrevocably.
