User:Teggles/sandbox
Origins: late 18th century to early 20th century
[edit]The use of electricity to manipulate sound begins with modified acoustic keyboards such as the 1753 Denis d’or and 1761 Clavecin electrique. However, electricity only began to be used for generating sound in 1876 with ???’s invention of the Musical Telegraph. Electricity also began to be used in the reproduction of recordings -- which already had precedents in mechanical form -- with Thomas Edison’s 1878 phonograph player.
In the late 1800s, further developments were made in the use of electricity. Magnetic wire recorders were invented in the 1890s. The phonograph began to gain popularity. Radio began to gain popularity. The Telharmonium, an electromechnical instrument and the first to use additive synthesis, was patented in 1897. However, these devices predate the invention of the vacuum tube in 1906, which was almost solely responsible for the electronics revolution of the first half of the 20th century.
The invention of the first vacuum tube in 1906 led to the generation and amplification of electrical signals, radio broadcasting, and electronic computation, among other things. Lee De Forest used the vacuum tube technology to create the Audion Piano in 1915, while in 1917 Edwin Armstrong and Forest separately invented an electronic oscillator using the audio tube. Other electronic instruments utilizing this technology were also created before the 1920s. [were any actually used popularly?]
A conception of a new music involving electric instruments was proposed by Ferruccio Busoni in 1907. Busoni had read of the Telharmonium, and predicted music necessitating the use of machines and industry. The Futurist movement, formed in 1909 by students of Busoni, promoted the use of noise in music and introduced experimental sounds inspired by machines. Futurist Luigi Russolo published his 1913 manifesto “The Art of Noises” and performed in 1914 with “acoustic noise-instruments”. [what happened to them?]
Pioneers: 1920s - 1930s
[edit]Growing use of electronic instruments
[edit]Leon Theremin developed the theremin, an electronic instrument operated by moving one’s hands in the air, in 1920. He performed a popular tour across Europe, and in 1928 production rights were granted to RCA Victor.
Though not a commercial success, the theremin’s sound and function appealed to listeners. Records featuring it were released from 1929, and thereminist Clara Rockmore performed worldwide in 1932. The theremin was used in Joseph Schillinger’s First Airphonic Suite from 1929, Dmitri Shostakovich’s score to the the 1931 film Odna, the 1934 film Liliom, and the 1936 radio play The Green Hornet.
The Ondes Martenot was invented and first performed in 1928. Like the theremin, it was also used in popular and classical music -- the Ondes Martenot appears in the 1932 film The Idea, the 1936 Sacha Guitry's film by Adolphe Borchard and the 1937 Olivier Messiaen composition Fête des belles eaux.
George Anthiel and Fernand Léger premiered the Futurist-inspired Ballet Mécanique in 1926, which was a mechnical play featuring airplane propellers and electric bells.
Other instruments developed include the Dynaphone in 1928, the Trautonium in 1930, the Rhythmicon in 1931, the Hammond Electric Organ in 1934, the polyphonic Warbo Formant Organ in 1937, and the Melodium in 1938. [were these popular or used at all?]
Turntable music
[edit]An early precedent for the use of turntables to create music was at a Dada event in 1920, where Stephan Wolpe played eight gramophones simultaneously at widely different speeds. Darius Milhaud experimented with record manipulation in 1922, as did Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy in 1923 and Edgard Verse in 1936 -- but none ended up using them in a final work.
Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch composed three recorded studies titled Grammophonmusik between 1929 and 1930.
1939 John Cage published Imaginary Landscape, No. 1, using two variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano, and cymbal, but no electronic means of production.
Graphical sound
[edit]Optical sound, a means of storing sound recordings on transparent film, was developed and popularized in the 1920s. In 1929, Arseny Avraamov and Evgeny Sholpo realized the technology could be used to create music, and they experimented with drawing directly onto optical film to synthesize sounds.
[they predicted a future of electronic music] Several methods of the graphical sound technique were developed, such as the 1932 Variophone. From 1930-34 more than 2000 meters of soundtrack and experimental films were produced by the Multzvuk group, only some of which survive.
Experiments with sound art were also conducted, with early practitioners including Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and others. The use of graphical sound continued with works by animators and composers such as Norman McLaren.
Further conceptions of electronic music
[edit]In 1933, Edgard Varese attempted to secure funding for an electronic music studio. After failing to do so, he published his 1936 manifesto The Liberation of Sound, which … John Cage also discussed the future of electronic music in 1937, as did Percy Grainger in 1938.
Development: 1940s - 1950s
[edit]Tape music, electroacoustic music and musique concrete
[edit]As mentioned before, magnetic tape recording went back to late 1890s. Various developments of tape had been made afterwards, leading up to the first practical magnetic tape recorder in 1935, and more developments in early 1940s.
Magnetic audio tape opened up a vast new range of sonic possibilities to musicians, composers, producers and engineers. Audio tape was relatively cheap and very reliable, and its fidelity of reproduction was better than any audio medium to date. Most importantly, unlike discs, it offered the same plasticity of use as film. Tape can be slowed down, sped up or even run backwards during recording or playback, with often startling effect. It can be physically edited in much the same way as film, allowing for unwanted sections of a recording to be seamlessly removed or replaced; likewise, segments of tape from other sources can be edited in. Tape can also be joined to form endless loops that continually play repeated patterns of pre-recorded material. Audio amplification and mixing equipment further expanded tape's capabilities as a production medium, allowing multiple pre-taped recordings (and/or live sounds, speech or music) to be mixed together and simultaneously recorded onto another tape with relatively little loss of fidelity. Another unforeseen windfall was that tape recorders can be relatively easily modified to become echo machines that produce complex, controllable, high-quality echo and reverberation effects (most of which would be practically impossible to achieve by mechanical means).
The first known example was composed in 1944 by Halim El-Dabh, a student at Cairo, Egypt.[29] He recorded the sounds of an ancient zaar ceremony using a cumbersome wire recorder and at the Middle East Radio studios processed the material using reverberation, echo, voltage controls, and re-recording. The resulting work was entitled The Expression of Zaar and it was presented in 1944 at an art gallery event in Cairo. While his initial experiments in tape based composition were not widely known outside of Egypt at the time
Musique concrete. First big movement of an electronic music. Used the techniques of tape, as well as electronic effects. Some seemed to use electronically-generated sound, but not much.
Experimental electronic music
[edit]In his 1949 thesis Elektronische Klangerzeugung: Elektronische Musik und Synthetische Sprache, Meyer-Eppler conceived the idea to synthesize music entirely from electronically produced signals; in this way, elektronische Musik was sharply differentiated from French musique concrète, which used sounds recorded from acoustical sources
WDR. The studio was formed in 1951, and early compositions were made and broadcast in 1951. 1952 compositions from Eimert survive. Karlheinz Stockenhausen in 1953.
two Japanese composers, Toru Takemitsu and Minao Shibata, independently wrote about the possible use of electronic technology to produce music during the late 1940s. In 1950, the Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) electronic music studio would be founded by a group of musicians in order to produce experimental electronic music using Sony tape recorders. Following as a model the NWDR Cologne studio, Japan's NHK company established an electronic-music studio in Tokyo in 1955, which became one of the world's leading electronic music facilities. The NHK Studio was equipped with technologies such as tone-generating and audio processing equipment, recording and radiophonic equipment, ondes Martenot, Monochord and Melochord, sine-wave oscillators, tape recorders, ring modulators, band-pass filters, and four- and eight-channel mixers.
= Rising popular electronic music
[edit]Theremin shows up more often, especially in movies such as 1951 The Day The Earth Stood Still.
Louis and Bebe Barron, who had previously worked with tape, released their first entirely electronic-work in 1951, and the 1952 compositions survive. The score for Forbidden Planet, by Louis and Bebe Barron,[66] was entirely composed using custom built electronic circuits and tape recorders in 1956.
Computer music
[edit]First computer music 1951? Stochastic music.
The world's first computer to play music was CSIRAC, which was designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard. 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.[67] However, CSIRAC played standard repertoire and was not used to extend musical thinking or composition practice. CSIRAC was never recorded, but the music played was accurately reconstructed. The oldest known recordings of computer generated music were played by the Ferranti Mark 1 computer, a commercial version of the Baby Machine from the University of Manchester in the autumn of 1951. The music program was written by Christopher Strachey. The impact of computers continued 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."[68] Later developments included the work of Max Mathews at Bell Laboratories, who developed the influential MUSIC I program. In 1957, MUSIC, one of the first computer programs to play electronic music, was created by Max Mathews at Bell Laboratories. Vocoder technology was also a major development in this early era. In 1956, Stockhausen composed Gesang der Jünglinge, the first major work of the Cologne studio, based on a text from the Book of Daniel. An important technological development of that year was the invention of the Clavivox synthesizer by Raymond Scott with subassembly by Robert Moog.
Expansion: 1960s
[edit]= Development of synthesizers
[edit]Computer music developments
[edit]Popular electronic music
[edit]In the UK in this period, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (established in 1958) came to prominence, thanks in large measure to their work on the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who. One of the most influential British electronic artists in this period[72] was Workshop staffer Delia Derbyshire, who is now famous for her 1963 electronic realisation of the iconic Doctor Who theme, composed by Ron Grainer.