Why end at 1990? Did 120 years sound more rounded then 130? Haven't there been several advances made in recording technologies since then? MiniDisc, MP3, widespread adoption of compact discs, SACD. Fourteen years is a long time...
As I suspected, the site is fairly old, click on "Introduction": '120 Years Of Electronic Music' is an ongoing project and the site will be updated on a regular basis (currently v3.0 feb 1998).
Regular basis..
Re:Why 1990?
by
TehHustler
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I expect that the jump from 1990 to 2004 will take a considerable amount of writing, when you think of all the technological advances we have had in such a short amount of time. And as someone else has pointed out, it does say "regular basis"
Re:Why 1990?
by
thrash242
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I agree that they shouldn't have stopped at 1990, but what do MiniDiscs, MP3, etc have to do with electonic music? It's about instruments, not ways of storing music electronically. Country music can be stored in MP3s, but it's certainly not electronic music.
You're right that there have been advances since then, but not about what kind. I think the widespread use of software rather than hardware is the biggest change in the last few years. Modern software synths, samplers and effects now are comparable in sound quality and usually more flexible than their hardware equivalents.
Generally speaking - as far as the actual intruments go - there really hasn't been anything exciting or new in the last 14 years though.
There's new software, and keyboards have more computer intigration, but most boards still come in two basic models - PCM digitized signal processors (and samplers) - or Synthesized Wavelength Processors.
They sound better each year, but those basics haven't changed much.
-- Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Re:Why 1990?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
as the author i guess i can respond...synthesisers got a bit boring after 1990 - what is there to compare apart from different presets and so-on. audio synthesis sodtware, now that's another story. just never got round to finishing it...
Well, in a time span of 130 years once a decade is frequently.
--
--
Cheers!
Re:Why 1990?
by
Emperor+Igor
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Right. Electronic music is evolving along the same lines as the computer did. It's becoming more and more accessible to the average person to make really complex music tracks at home.
Well, knowing a bit about the subject at hand, I'll bet as many innovations in electronic music have happened in the last 15 years as have happened from 1870 to 1990.
yeah, but there's a lot more to electronic music than synths. a small sampling of exciting new things in the last 14 or so years:
max/MSP-type control and synthesis becoming sufficently fast to be able to do interesting, complex real-time "interactive" sound art.
real time granular synthesis has become something that's realistic to do.
it's become possible to produce basically arbitrary sound fields with fixed arrays of speakers (wave-field synthesis).
control interfaces, especially gestural interfaces, have become much more nuanced. people have done some really cool things with motion-tracking, wacom tablets, pressure sensitive materials, etc, to control musical processes.
the quality of computer-composed music has vastly increased
Now, I grant that most of these advances have been pretty much confined to the "academic" (i.e. not pop music) domain. But, jesus, this is in the context of "electronic music since 1870", most of which was done in the academic domain.
Haven't there been several advances made in recording technologies since then?
From what I remember of looking at the site before it was Slashdotted, it doesn't cover recording technologies so much as sound generating technologies: the instruments themselves.
I think the major advance there, incidentally, is acoustic modelling (patented by Stanford University and implemented by Yamaha, just like FM synthesis of the eighties).
Insider Scoop: because the guy who made it (crab) worked for a web design company called Obsolete.com... and Obsolete.com went belly up around 1990... how the **** long did it take the site to get slashdoted!!?? A LONG TIME
would Doctor Who, and bad Sci-fi movies have been without Where one of these for the sound effects?
Re:Greatest instrument ever!
by
kfg
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The Theremin is hardly obsolete. Moog makes them and it is still being composed for. Led Zepplin, among others, have used them in modern recordings.
No, it isn't as popular as the guitar, or even the recorder, but then it never was in the first place.
If you want an example of an "obsolete" instrument that would the violin. The Theremin supercedes it.
KFG
Re:Greatest instrument ever!
by
gilgongo
·
· Score: 1
Is it true that some of the sounds used in the original theme music for Dr Who were made by slowing down a recording of a nail being hammered into a piece of wood?
My music teacher once mentioned that, but I've never been interested enough until now to know if it was true.
-- "And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Re:Greatest instrument ever!
by
Gordonjcp
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Possibly, but most of the original "lead" of the theme music was done with a sine oscillator, careful tweaking of the frequency knob, and lots of cutting and shutting on tape.
The TARDIS sound effect was made by running a key down the bass strings of a gutted piano, and a bit reverb. Lots of BBC Radiophonic Workshop sound effects were made by bashing, bending and otherwise abusing fairly common objects, then speeding up, slowing down, and reversing the sounds on tape. The "laser gun" effects in Blake's 7 were apparently made by gaffa-taping a microphone to an electricity pylon, and bashing one of the other legs of the pylon with a big spanner.
Re:Greatest instrument ever!
by
proj_2501
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Re:Greatest instrument ever!
by
Evil+Grinn
·
· Score: 1
The "laser gun" effects in Blake's 7 were apparently made by gaffa-taping a microphone to an electricity pylon, and bashing one of the other legs of the pylon with a big spanner.
They used the exact same thing for Star Wars, and Ben Burtt claims to have invented it. Don't know much about British TV - which came first, Blake's 7 or Star Wars?
The violin is one of the awesomest insturments ever. It will be a sad day when it is obsolete.
As it happens I concur fully.
KFG
Re:Greatest instrument ever!
by
SydShamino
·
· Score: 1
Interestingly, I saw Simon and Garfunkel in concert in Dallas last Thursday. During one of the songs ("Cecilia") they whipped out - you guessed it - a Theremin.
The big screen over the stage just showed the musician's two hands hovering in the spotlight. All the folks around us in the audience were whispering "What is that?" while my wife and I were quite impressed. (It was one of the band members, not S or G playing it.)
-- It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Re:Greatest instrument ever!
by
The+Evil+Couch
·
· Score: 1
looks like Star Wars. it was released in 1977 and Blake's 7 was first aired in 1978.
would Doctor Who, and bad Sci-fi movies have been without Where one of these for the sound effects?
Not only that, but what about the Beach Boys "Good Vibrations?" (Think about it. A Theremin is in there.) Here's a really interesting documentary on Leon Theremin and his invention.
it's 120 years of electronic musical instruments...
For example, Steve Reich's Pendulum Music is pretty much electronic music, but doesn't involve an electronic musical instrument.
Re:No,
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0, Insightful
Except for the microphone and amplifier... Those are electronic... so I guess the person wasn't a robot?
Modern Electronica and House....
by
millahtime
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Modern Electronica, House, Techno, etc actually came from Detroit, Michigan, USA. THe Motor City. Every year there is the Detroit Electronic Music Festival.
Re:Modern Electronica and House....
by
mccalli
·
· Score: 1
Modern Electronica, House, Techno, etc actually came from Detroit, Michigan, USA. THe Motor City. Every year there is the Detroit Electronic Music Festival.
Yeah, but if you keep quiet about it we'll try our hardest to forgive you.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Modern Electronica and House....
by
gilgongo
·
· Score: 1
Although if you ask many early Detroit house and techno artists, they will cite European influences such as Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode. The Wire Magazine had some interviews with some of the people on the early Detroit scene.
-- "And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Re:Modern Electronica and House....
by
jrumney
·
· Score: 1
I'm not sure you can point to any one location as the origin of electronica. Many of those European artists will point to Yellow Magic Orchestra (Japan) as one of their influences, then there's early Pink Floyd and other 1960's experimental stuff that predates all those (though Kraftwerk may have been around that long, I'm not sure).
Re:Modern Electronica and House....
by
Inda
·
· Score: 1
And I would like to thank the British Media for bigging-up the whole Acid House scene in 1990, 1991 and 1992. You did more to promote the scene than we could ever have achieved by ourselves. The way you portrayed everything in the scene as evil was just what teenage lads like myself wanted to get into.
Top one, nice one, get sorted.
-- This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Re:Modern Electronica and House....
by
thrash242
·
· Score: 1
Musique Concrete is commonly looked at as the precursor to electronic music as we know it today. It was made (in the 40s and 50s) by taking electronic lab equipment that produced tones, recording them to tape (along with sounds occuring in nature) and then splicing that tape creatively to make music. The first "loop" came from this era also and was an physical loop of audio tape that played endlessly. Very tedious, obviously, but at the time it was the only way to make music electronically. This was before synthesizers as we know them today (ie: noise-making boxes with keyboards or some kind of control input) existed.
The history of electronic music and its precursors is pretty interesting if you care to look into it.
Re:Modern Electronica and House....
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Techno did indeed have its origins in Detroit, however, House and Acid House were born in Chicago. The British claim to have started Jungle/Drum n' Bass, but I read somewhere that there were tracks with the Amen break popping up at underground clubs in Detroit (or maybe it was Philly) as early as '87.
Re:Modern Electronica and House....
by
EnderWiggnz
·
· Score: 0
philly does have a hand in the happy-house scene, with josh wink and nigel at the head....
-- ... hi bingo...
Re:Modern Electronica and House....
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Detroit was big for the techno scene - house began in Chicago and New York.
The best book on the history of electronic dance music is "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life". It's a really interesting genre to read about.
Re:Modern Electronica and House....
by
justkarl
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Modern Electronica, House, Techno, etc actually came from Detroit, Michigan, USA.
I would disagree. Although modern "techno"(in the specific definition of it) comes from detroit, most people would argue that house music was born in Chicago & New York as a bastard child of disco. Most orgins of different types of electronic music, in my opinion, can be attached to different locations in the U.S. and parts of europe.
Re:Modern Electronica and House....
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
No way, man. Belleville, Michigan~!
Re:Modern Electronica and House....
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Until the Criminal Justice Act (1994, Section 63) came along and ruined everything.
Re:Modern Electronica and House....
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Detroit
Huh? Maybe American "electronica" et c. But that's because the DJs in Detroit played Kraftwerk and other German/Belgian/Italian/British music.
One word: Düsseldorf.
Re:Modern Electronica and House....
by
Seehund
·
· Score: 1
Kraftwerk began as "1960's experimental stuff" (as "Organisation"). Kraftwerk, Can, Tangerine Dream et c. are those who brought those electronic thingamajigs to the mainstream (new wave, Depeche Mode,..., to the industrially produced garbage we have today).
YMO wasn't formed until 1978 (and thus not a source of inspiration to any European pioneers, but the other way round), one decade after Kraftwerk.
Were they around before 1990? This web site only goes up to then. Steinberg were ve influential before 1990 hence they clearly deserve to be mentioned.
Re:What about NI
by
tulimulta
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I don't think that NI existed in the 1980s. Do correct me if I'm wrong.
The beginning of the list was fascinating, but from the 1970s onwards the list has glaring omissions. Where's the ARP synths? Not to talk about the 1980s list. They should remove the last 20 years from the list, since other sites manage that part way better, eg. synthmuseum.com.
-- -
Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
Hmm...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Might make a nice addition to the Wikipedia page on the same topic, with the author's permission, of course. Dunno why this is on the front page of Slashdot, though...
Discogs is my favorite source for info on electronic music.
-- The IT section color scheme sucks.
But who cares about such old history?
by
vivekg
·
· Score: 1
Sorry but I'm not intrested in it... this is not geeky stuff at all! Please correct me if I'm wrong:-)
-- The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
thrash242
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
To me, electronic music is the geekiest kind. At least some (ie: not rave crap or piano music played on an electronic keyboard) electronic music. What other kind of musician other than a geeky one sits around staring at a computer screen and in front of boxes with oodles of knobs making bleepy noises? It's not as "cool" or socially accepted as playing guitar, piano, etc. Guitarists and drummers and the like don't have to worry about all the very technical aspects of synths, sequencers, samplers, etc that electronic musicians do. Plus, if you like computers and technology, it seems like you'd want to make or listen to music made possible by computers and technology.
Most people on Slashdot don't seem to be that much into electronic music, which kind of surprises me. Or maybe I'm guessing wrong.
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
WoodenRobot
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There's little geekier than the IDM scene, which seems to thrive on how obscure your tastes can get. There's an immense number of 'bands' that have popped up out there thanks to people using their computers to make the music they want to hear. Although there's a lot of crap out there, there are also some real gems.
It's a shame that people, especially in the US, it seems, think electronic music = bad chart 'techno', and therefore discard an immense amount of cool music. (
-- --- "I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
networkBoy
·
· Score: 1
Agreed. Besides these guys were the geeks of their time. They are our heritage. Also I'd like to note that the Therimin is not obsolete as you would be led to believe by the host name.... -nB
-- whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
zalle
·
· Score: 1
I think you have it pretty much wrong. You seem to be missing the point that just an ordinary guitar is not much less technical than a Moog, just because it looks simple and most people playing them are idiots. (Consider for instance what it means that the strings are made of certain material, and how it affects the sound.) Music has for a long long time been extremely technical and "geeky", it's just that recently with popular music, there are "artists" who have no clue about the true workings of their instrument. Look at punk rockers who are unable to play at all (which is not to say that they don't sound great) or Britney Spears who can't even sing (which is to say that she sounds awful). Then on the other hand we have people like J.S. Bach or Jimi Hendrix, who knew their instruments better anything, for them it was the most important thing in their life. Quite geeky I'd say.
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
liquidsin
·
· Score: 1
True musicians, no matter what their weapon of choice, are geeks. To dismiss a musician as not having to worry about "technical aspects" just because they don't surround themselves with blinking lights and shiny dials is pretty narrow minded. Watch a drummer playing with hi hats and a double kick pedal, and keeping perfect time. Watch that drummer alternate between playing the skin on the snare and the rim, or hitting different spots on the drum heads to get different tones. Watch a guitarist make strange contortions with his hand to play jazz chords, or tap the fingerboard with his strumming hand while playing scales with his fretting hand. Watch a bass guitarist slap and pop while they play triplets up the neck. Anyone who devotes that much time and practice to an art is a geek in my book.
-- do not read this line twice.
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
snddsn-too
·
· Score: 1
As someone who has had the distinct pleasure/agony to actually have "played" on one of these ancient pieces of equipment, an original Moog and Mini-Moog, let me tell you that Electronic Music is the ULTIMATE in Geekiness (can you say computer programmer meets electronics repair person meets composer?).
While it may be "old history" and boring and not geeky to the younger set, the invention of the programmable synthesizer, especially the Moog Synthesizer, not only ushered in the beginning of one of the most exciting times for Electronica; it also was the beginning of making ALL things computer more accessible to the everyman. The full Moog took up an entire room but Moog and a few others took their concepts and made them "small" for portable/"everyman" use and this required re-engineering the circuits so that they would do the same "job" as the "big boy" but would be compact and fit in a small case.
Furthermore, all these early synthesizers had to be programmed by hand (i.e. punch cards, etc), to allow playback of the music. All of this was one factor that led to folks at DEC/IBM to take a look at what was going on over in the "Electronic Music World" and consider designing smaller computers for personal use and to use some of the innovations in circuit design from the Electronic Music World to bring you your 100Gig hardrive and 256MB USB Stick.
So every time you turn on your computer, you should thank the folks from this boring old ancient world for their forethought and their "geekiness" because they did it the hard way...built in their garage and didn't have someone else's code to "work from".
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
What other kind of musician other than a geeky one sits around staring at a computer screen and in front of boxes with oodles of knobs making bleepy noises?
what? real geeks write their own sound synthesis programs in c... i mean assembler... i mean real geeks write all their code on punch cards and send them off to be processed, and then build a digital to analog converter from spare parts to turn the results of the data processing in to a signal that can be recorded on audio tape.
<mutter>graphical knobs on a screen... geez!</mutter>
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
zoeblade
·
· Score: 1
To me, electronic music is the geekiest kind.
Mhmm, definately. You can synthesize sounds using either electricity (mmm, modulars) or maths. If you use the latter, then you can write simple programs that produce electronic timbres. I've gone from mucking around with Amiga.mods to using rackmounts to programming very simple instruments in Python. It's much easier to work out how the sound works with electronics or maths than it is to try and make or customise acoustic instruments.
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Watch that drummer alternate between playing the skin on the snare and the rim, or hitting different spots on the drum heads to get different tones. Watch a guitarist make strange contortions with his hand to play jazz chords, or tap the fingerboard with his strumming hand while playing scales with his fretting hand. Watch a bass guitarist slap and pop while they play triplets up the neck.
Watch those guys then get laid after a gig and lose all geek cred.
NOW we separate the men from the..nerds.
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
phuturephunk
·
· Score: 1
As a person who used to DJ and work the sampler into sets from time to time, I can honestly say I probably got better quality ass than the bonafide 'musicians' in local bands from the area. Rock chicks are dirty. At least with the strobelight hunny she'll be waxed, plucked and scented to perfection..Not to mention packaged in some pretty suggestive clothing.
I'll take that over skanky rocker chick any day of the week.
Note: I am a fan of many different flavors of music, so don't think I"m being a reactionary bastard.
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
thrash242
·
· Score: 1
I didn't say anything about skill, I just said technical aspects, by which I meant technical knowledge. You're referring to skills, which all decent musicians need. I'm talking about technical knowledge like how to hook up a complex MIDI set up, how to program complex synthesizers, how to tweak soundcards for low latency, stuff like that. Guitarists need to know what knobs on their amps to turn to make it sound cool and how to string and tune their guitars (and I used to be a guitarist in a band, so I'm not badmouthing them in any way).
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
thrash242
·
· Score: 1
I agree. Techno isn't even what people here think of as techno, for that matter, hence the quotes you put around it, I assume.
That's why whenever people learn that I write electronic music, they ask if I'm a DJ, which I'm not. It get pretty old after a while. Different sorts of electronic music are more known in Europe and even Canada than here (the US). It's sad they're not known here too, since a great many electronic pioneers were and are American.
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
thrash242
·
· Score: 1
Well, there are definately geeks in any musical pursuit, but I just meant that electronic music is the geekiest kind to me. For the record, I have played piano, violin and guitar. The thing about electronic music is that if you're going to write good stuff, you usually need to have a pretty decent understanding of how your hardware/software works. In order to make new sounds (instead of using synth presets), you need to understand how myriad kinds of synthesis works. Just like any type of music, you can have fun and make decent music without neccesarily having a deep understanding of how your instrument(s) works. Electronic musicians also have multiple instruments that they all have to be familiar with to create whole songs.
Anyway, I'm not dismissing guitars or any other instruments, as I used to play one and know that it's not as easy as it looks. I'm just saying that to me, there's a lot more technical knowledge needed to surpass the most basic "look, ma, I'm a DJ!" level of electronic music composition and production than there usually is to surpass the "look, ma, I'm a rock star!" level of guitar proficiency.
And yes, geeks can exist in any field and people who geek out overy any instrument are full-fledged geeks.
BTW, The Minibosses are a pretty geeky rock band; they cover Nintendo songs...and do a good job of it.
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
Lord_Dweomer
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
"ie: not rave crap"
You've obviously never been to a real rave based on this statement.
It really pisses me off that the cheesy crap that gets labeled as "rave music" would force the DJ to be laughed off the decks if he ever spun it at a REAL rave.
I was in the scene for years, and I found that real raves had FAR better tunes than most clubs who sometimes play "rave music" to sell tickets.
Real underground DJs are on top of the bleeding edge of electronic music, and for you to associate them with this crap is an insult to them and any real raver out there.
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
thrash242
·
· Score: 1
It's still electronic music designed to be danced to. I'm aware that there's more to it than most people think. However, I still don't like it, and I disagree that it's the bleeding edge of electronic music. You obviously don't know much about electronic music beyond dance music.
How do you know I haven't been? Maybe I have been and I just don't like the music.
Sorry, but I'm not impressed by your 1337 REAL raverness. At least tell me you don't dress like a hippy baby with pants the size of a parachute.
Besides, if the music played at such events can't be enjoyed without being high on horse tranquilizers and ecstasy, it can't be very good, now, can it?
I don't mean to insult anyone who likes this sort of music. My original point is that there is a lot more to electronic music than dance/rave/trance/hardcore/D&B/jungle/whatever-the -new-sub-sub-sub-genre-is -today music and most people don't realize it. You've proven my point, just from the other side of the rave music rules/sucks fence.
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
if youre going to throw that comment out there, you might as well add some links...
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
WoodenRobot
·
· Score: 1
-- --- "I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Re:But who cares about such old history?
by
Lord_Dweomer
·
· Score: 1
My point was that you were associating the "rave music" genre with actual raves, when in fact there is almost no music from the "rave music" genre that is actually played at them. That genre is totally separate, although related, to house, trance, hardcore, etc.
I was not trying to sound 1337, I was trying to separate the real music from the cheesy pop crud that people incorrectly associate with the real rave scene.
I don't dress like that, but I feel anybody is free to dance in whatever way makes them happy.
And to further show your lack of knowledge of what a real rave is like, there is in fact not nearly as much drug use at raves as you imply. And it is very easy to enjoy the music at a party with good DJs without drugs. You were making a decent attempt at a discussion with me, but blew it by adding that drug bit.
Seems like they have concentrated on the instruments themselves. I reacted to this myself as i expected to see Kraftwerk mentioned somewhere around 1970.
On a side note, i am going to a Kraftwerk concert this week. I am very much looking forward to it. =)
Perhaps that is the guy I am thinking of. I remember being tought (in an awful music history class) that the first electronic piece was "Hiroshima" around '69. If I remember correctly, it was done by cutting and stretching tape containing sounds/music. Very different from today's concept of electronic music.
-- Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
I think you're thinking of "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima", by Penderecki. Unfortunately, it is not a piece of electronic music, but is actually performed on acoustic intruments by orchestra. I believe it was composed sometime around 1959 or 1960, though I can't remember the exact date. Anyone?
Early pieces of electronic music (including the musique concrete tape-music to which you refer) were carried out in the late 1940s by various people in europe.
I can understand why one might think upon listening that "Threnody" is a piece of musique concrete (it has a lot of sounds that one wouldn't imagine string instruments producing), but it really is an entirely acoustic piece.
I do recognize that title so I may be mistaken on the piece that I am thinking of. I am fairly certain that there was a piece around that time that was made by stretching and cutting/joining tapes.
-- Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Lifted from Bash.org
by
The-Bus
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
c-rock: Whatever happened to sex drugs and rock n roll? Now we just have aids crack and techno.
--
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Re:Lifted from Bash.org
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Huh? The latter is pretty much a result of the former. Too much casual sex, and drug needles, led to aids. Crack is a drug or is it the implication that their drugs are nobler than crack? Finally, techno and rock 'n' roll are in the same league. They are a generation's form of expression. Unless, again, is the implication that techno is crap but rock 'n' roll is some high form of art right next to classical music?
My message to the aging rockers: fuck you.
Re:in 1990 it ended because
by
thrash242
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Far from all electronic music is rave "music". There is a lot of innovative stuff being made today. But, it's just like mainstream rock, rap, whatever...the most visible 90% of any music genre sucks. Of course, "electronic music" isn't a genre per se, it's the way it's made. Anyway, my point is: not all electronic music now is rave "music", just like not all electronic music in the 80s was New Wave.
I'm wondering why they didn't make it until 2000 and make it 130 years of electronic music? Well, the article is actually about instruments, not the actual music (from what I saw, anyway). But plenty of cool isntruments have come out since 1990; both software and hardware.
And I realize that your post was probably intended as humor, but I thought I'd point this out anyway.
Wow. 6 years ago.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Slashdot: News for God Knows Who. Stuff from the Very Distant Past... or from Yesterday's Slashdot.
List of instruments, yes, influence, no.
by
JazzXP
·
· Score: 1
Interesting link, but it doesn't show how influcencial on electronic music each one was. That would be a very interesting stat. Eg. In most peoples minds, the Dr Who theme was the start of mainstream electronic music, but what inspired that?
Re:List of instruments, yes, influence, no.
by
Nosher
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There's an interesting article about the creators of the Dr. Who theme, the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, here (especially the section entitled "early days"). The Workshop is indeed often credited with introducing electronic music (influenced to a degree by the French "Music Concrète" school) into the mainstream, at least in the UK. There were all sorts of cool tales about the hacks they used to create their effects, for example tape-loops that were so long the tape would be fed out of one room, down the corridor and back through another office.
-- It's too late for me to die young
Theremin!
by
Random_Goblin
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The Theremin Leon Termen Soviet Union 1917
This looks to be the oldest electronic instrument that is still regarlly used today... of particular note is the artist Goldfrapp who plays a theremin in a MOST provocative manner during her live gigs!
87 years is quite a respectable age. I can't see a date for electric guitar anywhere on the site.
also just got to love
Dr Kent's Electronic Music Box Dr Earle Kent USA 1951
do you think he had an advertising jingle?
Electric guitar is missing
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0, Insightful
The list has plenty of keyboard instruments but no mention of the electric guitar. The keyboard or the fingerboard are the input device. The sound is basically created electronically.
Yes, I know that the guitar strings vibrate but the sound is nothing like my acoustic guitar.
Re:Electric guitar is missing
by
MBAFK
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I noticed this too, but after a bit of googling I found out probably why it's not on that list:
Source
An electronic musical instrument is a musical instrument that produces its sounds using electronics. In contrast, the term electric instrument is used to mean instruments whose sound is produced mechanically, and only amplified electronically - for example an electric guitar.
Re:Electric guitar is missing
by
dankstick
·
· Score: 0
The electric guitar should be there. Most electric guitar pickups do not receive acoustic vibrations to be sent to an amplifier. They receive electromagnetic vibrations from the strings. The sound is produced mechanically, but is not captured through a microphone. Some microphonic pickups do exist, but aren't as common.
There should at least be mention of the MIDI Guitar (Did it exist in their time frame?). It allows your guitar to sound like one of your many MIDI instruments...
I recall Fender producing MIDI guitars. I couldn't seem to find them on their website.
Re:Electric guitar is missing
by
dave420
·
· Score: 1
Putting a piano through an amplifier with screwed up bass/treble and blown speakers gives you a sound unlike a normal piano, but it's not an electrical instrument;)
Theremin
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
http://imdb.com/title/tt0108323/
Stylophone!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Stylophone Rolf Harris Australia 1967
"Can you tell what it is yet?" "No! It's just a fucking annoying buzzing noise!!"
Don't think he ever played it in a provocative manner though...
although quite a few people wanted him to stick it...[edited for good tase (unlike mr harris)]... which is of course what ms goldfrapp does with the rather larger theremin... and keeps it in tune too, the love.
Software synths
by
CausticPuppy
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Maybe they update the page every 10 years or something. In 2008 they'll have coverage up through 2000 perhaps?
If they can cover up through 2004, probably one of the most important developments is software-based synthesizers, which either use totally new methods of synthesis (example: Antares Kantos) or emulate many of the older models on that list.
So there have been improvements in electronic music and synthesis in recent years, but nowadays everything is so electronic anyway that we don't hear anything and think "oh that's groundbreaking."
An analogy can be made with computer special FX. It's kind of like how the dinosaurs in the original Jurassic Park movie blew everybody away and were revolutionary back then. Now, over 10 years later, CG effects are 100 times better, but everybody is so used to CG effects by now that not a lot of it is revolutionary any more.
-- -CausticPuppy
"Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Re:Software synths
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
If they can cover up through 2004, probably one of the most important developments is software-based synthesizers...
They do have software synthesizers on there, starting with Music I, which was developed in the 50's. Sure, it's a breakthrough that it is now possible to do this in realtime. There are also new software synthesis algorithms being developed all the time, as you mentioned. But the idea of software synthesis itself is not new.
someone on/. thinks that max/MSP is hard to use? obscure, and at times rediculous, certainly. but hard to use? c'mon. it's just another programing language (with an admittedly strange syntax), after all.
As this is only a list of manufacturers of synthesizer hardware, it's leaving out an enormous amount. Not only artists, but manufacturers of other important equipment both hardware and software used in electronic music production. There's no mention of sequencers, mixers, storage media, MIDI and the plethora of related items that have evolved alongside, and complement, the synth (the intro does exclude them from the scope of the article though).
I couldn't see any entry for Jarre's laser harp. Or modern 'software synths', many of which emulate 'old' dedicated hardware and substite for their antiquated predecessors.
That's because a lot of pop artists can't sing, and distorting their voices will make them sound cool and distract you from their singing or the artifacts created from pitch matching.
Ok then - who here plays?
by
mccalli
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Interesting one for me this - I got into keyboards and computers at roughly the same age (about nine), and have been using one to help with the other ever since.
This mushroomed when I got an Atari ST - still the most influential machine for me. I got it for the games, but also spent time learning C on it and got into Steingberg Pro 12 - I bought the excellent for its time mono monitor, and never looked back.
Main inspiration for learning electronic music as a kid would be the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Always remembered for their Dr Who work, it's often forgotten that they did an awul lot more than this - the incidental music for the nature series Life On Earth was superb, and it's a track called The Astronauts (Through A Glass Darkly album, Peter Howell) which finally made me decide I wanted to play.
I've since decided to try learning piano as well as keyboard (very different - left hand work especially), but I'm essentially a keyboard player dabbling with piano, not a pianist dabbling with keyboards.
So, who else then? Any links to music? I've barely put online anything I did, but there's some really early teenage stuff from me and also a couple of ~1999 tracks available here. Don't laugh too loudly please...I've written better. Honest.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Ok then - who here plays?
by
Spaceman40
·
· Score: 1
I'm a pianist messing with my little Oxygen MIDI controller - it rocks hardcore. About the same background, though. I like the lack of a left hand in a lot of my synth stuff; lets me work harder on the actual bass line and melodic harmonies, blah blah blah...
I've got a WIP on music.download.com - "broken link", under electronica (I do electronic classical/jazz - strangest genre ever, but it's a party).
I don't think any of my stuff is that awesome, either - I think it's a requirement for keyboardists or something. You use Reason (Propellerheads Software)? Acid Pro? Cakewalk? FruityLoops?
-- I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Re:Ok then - who here plays?
by
mccalli
·
· Score: 1
I like the lack of a left hand in a lot of my synth stuff; lets me work harder on the actual bass line and melodic harmonies, blah blah blah...
Yep - can understand that. I tend to record by playing in with a baseline in split mode on the keyboard (or electronic piano as I now use), then go back and add a more complex base afterwards.
I don't think any of my stuff is that awesome, either - I think it's a requirement for keyboardists or something.
Main problem I've got is that I mess around too much. I have about ten partially completed tracks, some totally completed in my head but never recorded, others I need to finish off, but I never get round to it. There's too much fiddling with the machinary available, that's the trouble.
You use Reason (Propellerheads Software)? Acid Pro? Cakewalk? FruityLoops?
Moved over to OS X a few months ago so am casting about at the moment. Was using Cubase VST and Acid Pro under Windows, now having a look at things like Logic Express.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Ok then - who here plays?
by
mikesmind
·
· Score: 1
I played guitar in a garage band in the 1970s and early 1980s. A friend of mine had a PAiA Electronics Gnome Micro-Synthesiser. We used it on gigs and had a lot of fun with it. It was especially good at doing the intro to Riding the Storm Out by REO. Instead of a keyboard, it had an electronic ribbon that you touched with a probe to make the different pitches. I had a diagram to indicate where to set all the dials.
Re:in 1990 it ended because
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
i want to make techno music on my PC. is there any software that will help me do this? how do the big name djs actually create their music? lots of hardware? thanks!
I wonder why it died in the 1990's?
by
digitalgimpus
·
· Score: 1, Funny
Hmm... could it be because Rock & Roll with a guy on a CASIO is just awkward?
Ugh, I hated that stuff.
Re:I wonder why it died in the 1990's?
by
zoeblade
·
· Score: 1
Hmm... could it be because Rock & Roll with a guy on a CASIO is just awkward?
Casios can be awkward in rock'n'roll, yeah. I'd stick with Moogs and Mellotrons.:)
shameless self-plugging
by
Evil+Grinn
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I made some these bits of electronic music as far back as 1990, how come I'm not on the list?
What with the one liner? No link, no cheap stab at MS or Linux? There should be a minimum lenght for news and comments, otherwise this place will look like a cheap blog... oh wait!
Because the Fender Rhodes used hammers to hit electric wires which were picked up electrically, akin to an electric guitar. That means it's not truly an electronic instrument, as it doesn't generate the musical tones electronically.
Re:Fender Rhodes
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
In about 2000 i read that someone had built a prototype of a new rhodes piano and that they were going into production soon. they had gotten then name back from whoever owned it, and i think the rhodes family was involved in the project somehow, but i can't seem to find anything about it on google anymore. does anyone else know anything about this? it would be cool if someone would start manufacturing Hammond B-3s again too (sine they're even more fun to lug around to gigs than a rhodes piano)
missed the tr-909 too
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
they don't have the tr-909 on the roland link! this drum machine along with the tr-808 and tb-303 have been and still are THE most important instruments in most acid and techno tracks.
the instrument..and the musicians?
by
cabazorro
·
· Score: 3, Informative
For the site to be truly complete it should provide famous music/musicians that made the sound of some of this instruments popular. The likes of: Tomita Jean Michelle Jarre Kitaro Vangelis Mike Oldfield Philip Glass and of course Tangerine Dream.
-- - these are not the droids you are looking for -
Re:the instrument..and the musicians?
by
WoodenRobot
·
· Score: 1
How could you forget Brian Eno?!:^O
The guy essentially invented ambient music!
-- --- "I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Re:the instrument..and the musicians?
by
east+coast
·
· Score: 1
Maybe you're being sarcastic, but you should check out the software "Reason" by Propellerheads Software.
My message to techno handbaggers.
by
turgid
·
· Score: 1
My message to the aging rockers: fuck you.
Wash your mouth out with soap and water, sunny Jim!
Rock is proper music played on musical instruments.
Techno handbag disco music is just a noise that comes out of machines. And just look on your local high street on a Friday or Saturday night and see the barely-clad, drug-crazed, orange, under-age youngsters queuing up to get into over-priced night-clubs to techno handbag disco the night away and possibly later surrendering their bodies to the nearest sentient being wearing the right brand of training shoes.
Zombies.
Give me some good old-fashioned guitar-based rock any day. Slayer, Voivod or even Metallica if things get desperate.
Re:My message to techno handbaggers.
by
Damek
·
· Score: 1
Have you watched any rock concert documentaries from the 60s and 70s? Most of the rock kids back then look like zombies if you ask me.
And it's funny that you define rock as "proper music played on musical instruments". As if a computer can't be a musical instrument. As if "rock is proper music" isn't a recursive definition...
If you ask me, rock and techno and hip-hop are all great. And if you ask me, the world will start being a little better place when age stops resenting youth and when youth stops disrespecting age.
Re:My message to techno handbaggers.
by
Emperor+Igor
·
· Score: 1
Hey, do aging rockers remember when people older than them told them that Rock n' Roll was just noise and was sinful?
Re:My message to techno handbaggers.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Techno handbag disco music is just a noise that comes out of machines. And just look on your local high street on a Friday or Saturday night and see the barely-clad, drug-crazed, orange, under-age youngsters queuing up to get into over-priced night-clubs to techno handbag disco the night away and possibly later surrendering their bodies to the nearest sentient being wearing the right brand of training shoes.
Dear me. Do you seriously think that's all electronic music is? Meat Market Music is obviously going to be pure crap - and absolutely nothing to do with people who have some real talent.
How about folks like Autechre, Coil, Eno, Aphex Twin, Orbital, Jeff Mills, Peshay, Basic Channel, Ritchie Hawtin - many of whom MAKE their own instruments...
Give me some good old-fashioned guitar-based rock any day. Slayer, Voivod or even Metallica if things get desperate.
Mmmm. Officially Rebellious Music(TM).
I remember I had a friend who loathed the notion of anything but metal, thinking what you see on MTV represents in any way electronic music - he changed his mind when I dragged him to some of Leeds' underground Acid Techno nights. Do yourself a favour - get a clue about what's out there, there's many excellent things to find....
Re:My message to techno handbaggers.
by
turgid
·
· Score: 1
Don't you know that the Saxophone is the instrument of the Devil, young man?
Re:My message to techno handbaggers.
by
Emperor+Igor
·
· Score: 1
Even if it's approximated through granular synthesis on my home computer?:P
Re:My message to techno handbaggers.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
For the second time, huh?? Are you still high?
...and possibly later surrendering their bodies to the nearest sentient being wearing the right brand of training shoes.
Right, because rock 'n' roll bands never had groupies where sex was involved. Nope. All those rebels with guitars were really innocent gentlemen underneath who respected women.
Give me some good old-fashioned guitar-based rock any day. Slayer, Voivod or even Metallica if things get desperate.
Last I checked those were heavy metal bands. Are you sure you know what pure rock is? Are you sure that if you heard true rock 'n' roll that you would like it?
My post is still score zero, but the parent reply has two points. HAVE YOU MODERATORS LOST YOUR FUCKIN' MINDS??
Re:My message to techno handbaggers.
by
turgid
·
· Score: 1
That's even worse, if you conjure one up using evil spirits and black magic:-)
Re:My message to techno handbaggers.
by
Emperor+Igor
·
· Score: 1
Can you think of a *better* way of creating electronic music?:P
I'm sticking to my devil noise music, thankyouverymuch!
Re:My message to techno handbaggers.
by
Zerbey
·
· Score: 1
Wash your mouth out with soap and water, sunny Jim!
Rock is proper music played on musical instruments.
Techno handbag disco music is just a noise that comes out of machines. And just look on your local high street on a Friday or Saturday night and see the barely-clad, drug-crazed, orange, under-age youngsters queuing up to get into over-priced night-clubs to techno handbag disco the night away and possibly later surrendering their bodies to the nearest sentient being wearing the right brand of training shoes.
Zombies.
Give me some good old-fashioned guitar-based rock any day. Slayer, Voivod or even Metallica if things get desperate.
Alright, I'll bite.
Actually, I do agree with you for the most part but I think you're seeing things a little too black and white. My Father has the same attitude, music stopped in the early 1970's as far as he is concerned (what he doesn't know about the 60's music scene isn't really worth writing about).
About 99% of the music today is a bunch of crap, generated by a computer and sung by someone who cannot sing without a lot of post production work to make their voice sound good (but they do look very nice, don't they?).
Fortunately, we have a few innovators out there who are managing either
a) Merge modern instruments and the old together to make a really fresh sound. A few examples (that you may like): Metallica (they've been using sythesisers for years, in part), Korn, Nine Inch Nails
b) Are actually at making synthesised music without sounding like the rest of the garbage out there. Listen to bands like Astral Projection, Orbital, etc.
Just don't get me started on Rap music...
A message to ageing rockers; Don't change, you guys are cool:)
Re:My message to techno handbaggers.
by
turgid
·
· Score: 1
My Father has the same attitude, music stopped in the early 1970's as far as he is concerned
Too darned right. It all went downhill after the Funky Gibbon.
Re:My message to techno handbaggers.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Kids, kids... you're both wrong.
Re:in 1990 it ended because
by
WoodenRobot
·
· Score: 1
Abelton Live is an AMAZING piece of sequencer software - very powerful and very, very easy to use. Used in combination with a good soundcard, this is all you'll need.
I also recommend FruityLoops for making drum loops, if you feel like it.
-- --- "I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Electric Guitar is not an electronic instrument.
by
Zen+Punk
·
· Score: 0
I know that the guitar strings vibrate but the sound is nothing like my acoustic guitar.
Have you ever heard of an Acoustic/Electric guitar? That is an acoustic guitar with a pickup. You can hook it up to an amplifier, and the sound coming out of the amp will be pretty much the same as that coming out of the soundhole, just louder.
An electric guitar generates sound by the same mechanism as an acoustic - the vibration of strings induces a corresponding vibration in the body of the guitar via the bridge. The body of the guitar moves air, a.k.a makes sound waves. In the case of an electric guitar, the vibration of the strings also induces a current in the electromagnetic pickups, which is fed to an amplifier where it is translated into sound.
The reason your electric guitar sounds different than your acoustic is the same reason a mandolin sounds different than your guitar - they are shaped differently, have different densities, and are made of different materials, which affects the way sound moves through them.
are drumsticks/mallets part of a drum?
as a side note, there have been about 2000 knock-offs of the basic idea of the theremin, where the instrument is controlled by electric / magnet fields, video, sound, etc. so it's not the only, but it may have been the first.
IIRC the theremin is the only musical instrument that can be played without the musician actually touching it.
The Doepfer A-100 modular synth now has a Theremin style CV source, meaning you can use that aerial to control just about anything (a filter's cutoff point, an LFO's speed, and so on). Two of them used to control a VCO's frequency and a VCA's amplitude can recreate a theremin, too.
Then there's D-Beam technology bought out by Roland a while back, using a different method to achieve a similar effect.
Forget one, even older than 1870?
by
Ignatius_VI
·
· Score: 1
When were the old player pianos invented with the roll that you put into the piano and use the pedals to hear the song?
Wouldn't it be digital since it's just a piece of paper with a hole or no hole for one or zero?
Re:Forget one, even older than 1870?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
The player piano can be considered digital, but it cannot be considered electronic since your feet mechanically drive it, so I don't think it should be included on a list of electronic instruments.
if anyone wants to rebut my previous statement, let me follow that up with this: naming the article 120 years of electronic music and not having kraftwerk is like having an article named 500 years of classical music and not having mozart or beethoven...sure they didnt create their instruments, but they sure as shit made it popular...
they should rename the article to 120 years of electronic music inventors...
It's like having an article about 500 years of woodwind, string and brass instuments and not mentioning Mozart or Beethoven, ie totally sensible once you grasp the concept.
-- A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
and my post/input is totally sensible if YOU had read all of the text and could grasp the concept that I said that the article should be aptly renamed to something like 120 years of electronic inventors/instruments rather than 120 years of electronic music.
the people referenced on the site may have changed the music world, but not through their music -- through others' use of their inventions. reading about robert moog is fine and dandy, but he alone didn't usher in a new era of electronic music. he was just some wacky inventor. Someone with musical talent and creative ideas made his instrument famous.
Re:See also...
by
3)+profit!!!
·
· Score: 2, Funny
In the "disclaimer" section of that site:
This guide is a non-technical, irreverent critique of electronic dance music. Its purpose is to entertain before it inforums. I suppose it could be used as a credited resource or educational primer, but that's not recommended since I made most of it up. Several biases here are celebrated lavishly, because downcasting people for their taste in music is close-minded. Except if their taste in music sucks.
Learn to link
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
You need to read the W3C's standard on linking pages. It should be "this web page has a list of music from blah to blah." to comply with standards.
They miss one of the most important ones.
by
illectro
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Modern Electronic music frequently features the 'acid' sound which was originally introduced to the Chicago House scene when some producers dicovered the Roland TB 303 automated bass synthesiser and sequencer. It was a pretty cheap piece of equipment and it never sold well. Most of them ended up discarded or in garage sales..... they only sold 20,000 over the 18 months that it was available. It didn't sound anything like that bass guitar it was supposed to be replacing.
However, the pioneering house music producers discovered that if the resonance and accent controls were turned up higher than any sane user had tried before then it produced a distinctive sound. Add some simple sequencing to som knob twiddling, lay it over a drum beat and *bang* that's where acid house came from.
The page does have a link which has a photo of the tiny machine, but you should check out this page for a more detailed history of this accident in electronic music evolution.
Re:They miss one of the most important ones.
by
zoeblade
·
· Score: 1
OK, the TB-303 was designed to help musicians practice along to, not to be a fully fledged synthesizer. As such it can only make one sound and it's not altogether that good.
Don't get me wrong, it's a very nice sound, especially when routed through a distortion pedal. Many artists (Norman Cook springs to mind) have done very well using them to add a little something to a mix that is otherwise kind of lacking. But it's just one sound.
It's nice and all, but extremely overrated, as if it can instantly make any song good just by being squeezed into the mix at the last minute.
The TR-909 would probably be a better choice if we're going for one of the holy trinity (the other being the TR-808), as it at least was featured in many different genres in music.
But personally I think sites like this should be about ground-breaking firsts that pioneer new methods of synthesis or at least new interfaces or approaches to a familiar concept, rather than just being popular. I'd have to pick the Yamaha VL-1 for being the first analogue modelling synthesizer, something which will probably take off one day when it's possible to get decent sounds out of it in real time for a few hundred dollars a synth.
>...the barely-clad, drug-crazed, orange, under-age youngsters... Zombies.
> Give me some good old-fashioned guitar-based rock any day. Slayer, Voivod or even Metallica...
Re:Heavy Metal Parking Lot.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Ozric Tentacles are a psychedelic rock band you fucking plank.
modern bands using these instruments
by
real_smiff
·
· Score: 1
for anyone interested in what a modern band can do with unusual old electronic tech., i suggest listening to Optiganally Yours - Exclusively Talentmaker (2000), a very good album IMHO.. i mean good music, not just a novelty. Rob Crow is the guy from Heavy Vegetable, Thingy, Pinback and Physics, bands which some of you have hopefully heard of! YMMV whether you think this is good of course. As their name suggests, they use the Optigan, which was mentioned in this article, but also the Chilton Talentmaker and the Vako Orchestron, "slightly varied descendants of the original Optigan" (thanks Allmusic, which i don't know how to link into, JS grr) and Pitchfork review for that info - worth a read!) Just thought this was an opportunity to push a lesser known & pretty creative band i like:) I wouldn't have thought i'd enjoy listening to anything made with such a cheesy looking instrument, it's surprising; hard to describe their sound as it's not really like any other band i know, it's 'alt pop/rock' apparently hmm but if you're interested the songs are (just about) available on P2P networks..
i'm sure they're must be other bands out there doing new stuff with strange old equipment... reply if you know any good ones!
--
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
The site would is kinda neat, but claiming it's covering electronic music and not the history of electronic music technology is misleading. You couldn't cover the history of rock and roll by listing guitar improvements, either:P
This list is hardly comprehensive!
by
mixwhit
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Where's the Sal-Mar Construction, created by Salvatore Martirano in the early 1970's, toured throughout the world in the 70's and 80's, and still seen as one of the most interesting improvisatory electronics instrument ever devised? How about one of the first wave synthesizers by James Beauchamp in the 1960's? The page also seems to include some software systems as instruments (as it should), but leaves out most such systems (CMusic, Music V, CSound, Music 4C, max, kyma, etc.).
This is a pretty bad/. post.
1. It's an old page - I remember reading it a few years ago.
2. Around 1990 is when desktop computers were finally strong enough to do basic synthesis and sampling. At that point the writing was on the wall: the age of hardware synthesis was doomed - it would eventually go software, and the results have been impressive. For example: Propellerhead's REASON provides more synthesis power than any reasonable human being could have afforded in 1990. You want 11 samplers in a rack? In 1990, it would have cost $11,000. With REASON, it's just 11 mouse clicks on a $350 piece of software on a $600 computer.
You want echo an each? That would have been another $5000. Ooops - big mistake? You're stuck with $16,000 of gear. In REASON, you simply select all and hit delete.
For all the crowing of the mystical qualities of a specific synthesizer's analogue wonderments, the simple fact is this: software synthesis is vastly cheaper. Today you can go out and blow thousands on a (brand x) synthesizer or hundreds on (brand y) software. The consolidations in the synth industry confirm all of this.
In the early 1980s there were many many manufacturers. Now there are a handful. This number will continue to reduce as hardware becomes increasingly irrelevant for sound production. At the same time intuitive control surfaces that simultaneously operate in open standards of MIDI and closed standards of dedicated software synthesis will be the next wave of the future in hardware synthesizer manufacture.
I'm on the inside of this, so believe me: it's all true. I'm not joking and it's happening NOW.
HW
-- Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
daydreamer
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
for some new electronic music, you should check out my new band 'daydreamer', a fully original collaborative project between dj isis and kruhft from vancouver, bc. The new site with the first 4 track release (mp3 and ogg available) called the 'what happened 2 ep' can be found at:
http://www.daydreamer.dynalias.net
if any of you have radio stations and enjoy the tracks feel free to add them to your playlists. if you do, i would appreciate an email so i can add your station to my own personal playlist and links section for the site (when i make it).
(To those who are wondering wtf that disclaimer is supposed to mean)...that is more of a "cover your ass" statement than anything else, in an attempt to stave off the hundreds of flames I'm sure that Ish gets daily.
Specifically because Ishkur is downright unabashedly nasty towards certain styles of Electronica; specifically Trance music and the commercialization / "dumbing-down" that it has seen over the past decade. Some subgenres of Trance emerge unscarred by Ishkur's wrath, but not many.
Some people seem to take personal offense to Ishkur's decrying of their favorite kind of music, and are rather vocal in letting him know (see the reader mail pages on his site, and for some more laughs search the threads at www.tranceaddict.com for "Ishkur"). I think the disclaimer there is just an attempt by Ish to "head them off at the pass" so to speak; Ishkur is sorta just saying "take this as you will and leave me the hell alone".
With that said... I have been frequenting Ishkur's site for a few years now and those "biases" he mentions in his disclaimer are, for the most part adquately explained by Ishkur and (I've come to see over the years) well deserved.
Of course, maybe all that was pretty clear beforehand to the crowd here and I'm just being CaptainObvious today
Link Wray is therefore also missing!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
If the distorted guitar counts as electronic music then Link Wray deserves a mention for "Rumble" arguably the first commercial tune to exploit the sound of a distorted overamplified guitar (in 1958 no less). He was an influence on The Who and many other "heavy" guitar-oriented bands, and in some ways is the father of heavy metal. See also http://www.oldies.com/artist/view.cfm/id_323.html
HAL9000
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Daisy... Daisy... give me an answer...do... I'm half... crazy... all for the... love... ... of ... ... you... ...
If you read "Advanced Programming Languages", by Raphael A. Finkel, there already was a language named Io, much more advant garde, if nearly unimplementable and unprogramable.
Shameless plug for one of my friends - he's a solo electronic artist , and has been making music since 1988, when he started off on the C64 , and then went onto the Amiga. He's been making music ever since.
Check him out if you're in Dublin , as he's doing a few gigs - listed on his website.
Electric guitar: ca. 1948
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I can't see a date for electric guitar anywhere on the site. http://www.google.com/search?&q=electri c-guitar+do wney-california+Paul-Bigsby
gewg_
William Duddell's singing arc
by
dtmos
·
· Score: 1
Unlikely as it may seem, William Duddell's singing arc has an important place in wireless history. It was based on the carbon arc lamp, invented by Sir Humphrey Davy in the 1840s and which became popular in the 1850s, prior to the invention of the incandescent lamp. The arc lamp employed two carbon rods which, when brought together and then separated, produced a brilliant white light.
Unfortunately, it also produced a lot of audio noise (hissing, spitting, and whistling), which limited its use to outdoor lighting. Tesla and JJ Thompson independently designed high-frequency ac alternators to try to overcome this noise, with limited success (although the alternator technology became useful later for long wave wireless transmitters).
Duddell found that, by placing a capacitor in parallel to the arc, he could change the noise into a more-or-less pure tone, and he could adjust the pitch of the tone by adjusting the value of the capacitor. He created a musical instrument by connecting several of these oscillators to a keyboard, and toured Europe as a travelling novelty act.
The Dane Valdemar Poulsen began experimenting with Duddell's arc in 1902. He found that the frequency of oscillation could be greatly increased by operating the arc in a hydrogen atmosphere (!), and that both the frequency of oscillation and the efficiency could be improved by placing a magnetic field perpendicular to the arc. He was able to move the frequency high enough to make Duddell's singing arc a useful wireless transmitter; in fact, it was the first negative resistance, continuous-wave oscillator ever made. (Spark transmitters produce a damped wave.)
The U.S. rights to Poulsen's arc transmitter were purchased in 1909 and were used by the Federal Telegraph Company to make extremely powerful wireless transmitters--1 megawatt transmitters were delivered to the U.S. Navy by 1918. However, by that time short waves, which the arc transmitter could not make efficiently, became more practical for long-distance communication, and the vacuum tube led to the demise of arc transmitter technology. There were, however, several interesting threads that continued on:
--Valdemar Poulsen also invented the "telegraphone," the first magnetic wire recorder
--The Federal Telegraph Company hired Lee DeForest to work on receivers for its stations; while there, he invented the triode vacuum tube
--Peter V. Jensen left Federal to invent the loudspeaker; formed the Magnavox Corporation
--In the 1930s, unused magnetic pole pieces from a scrapped 1 megawatt arc transmitter were scavenged by Prof. Ernest O. Lawrence at the University of California at Berkeley, and used to make the first cyclotron subatomic particle accelerator.
So William Duddell's singing arc had quite a legacy!
Re:in 1990 it ended because
by
Lord_Dweomer
·
· Score: 1
"not all electronic music now is rave "music""
And hardly any "rave music" is actually played at real underground raves. The DJs have better taste than that and are playing some of the best sounding house, jungle, trance, breaks, DnB, techno, or w/e tracks out there.
"Rave music" is a mislabeled genre that seeks to catch on to the popularity of the rave scene, but is in fact complete shit that you usually only hear in cheesy clubs that cater to teeny boppers who have no real clue what the rave scene is really like. Sad really.
Re:in 1990 it ended because
by
thrash242
·
· Score: 1
house/jungle/trance/breaks/dnb/techno is all what I consider rave music. It's exactly what I was referring to when I said "rave music". What did you think I was talking about when I said rave music? Kylie Minogue? Madonna? I'm familiar with the most basic of the zillions of dance music genres out there and I don't like about 98% of it. It's so forumlaic it's sad. My point is *all* that is dance music that is typically played at raves. There is a whole other world of electronic music out there besides that. Thanks for helping me prove my point.
electronic == electricity
by
opencity
·
· Score: 1
Music involving the manipulation of a speaker's electromagnetic coil is electronic music? The electric guitar. See: Jimi Hendrix.
Music involving any 'overdubbing' is sound sculpture as opposed to creation at one time under a clock. Jazz is music created at once. Pop rock / since Pet Sounds Sgt Pepper etc... is music created slowly like painting. This includes all hiphop dance related musics of the 80s 90s.
Article \.ed all day but I thought I'd give my 2c.
-- Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Gardner Post and I have recently finished our first Video Baby Grand Piano, featuring a pair of MIDI-enabled turntables driving a pair of XP DV machines running ScratchTV, a QuickTime application for scratching video. The project is part of ongogin efforts to create psyschedelic dance-able video music. http://www.gregdeocampo.com/2430E7EC365A446581D623 C20F2724D1/page/display.asp?id=579
-- /* http://www.gregdeocampo.com */
Re:in 1990 it ended because
by
Lord_Dweomer
·
· Score: 1
You seem to have completely missed what I was saying.
There is an actual genre called Rave Music, which is much of that pop crap, and some of the really bad stuff that sounds similar to trance, house, etc.
It is its own separate genre, and sees almost zero playtime at real underground raves.
You are free to consider the genre whatever you want, but you will be wrong on a lot of accounts.
The good stuff, which any good DJ will spin, is not so formulaic as to be offputting, and if it is very formulaic, the skills of the DJ are even more important because they can mix it into something better.
I am well aware of how vast the electronic music world is, but I wanted to correct your misguided notion of what is actually played at raves since you really do seem clueless.
Re:in 1990 it ended because
by
thrash242
·
· Score: 1
I have never heard of "rave music" as a specific genre. I was talking about suff that is played at raves, and to a lesser extent electronic dance music in general. I was referring to trance/house/jungle/d'n'b/hardcore/breakbeat/techn o/etc. I don't like about 95% of that stuff. To me it's mostly uncreative fluff that is made to be danced to, not appreciated as music. Even people who make it don't call themselves musicians. They're "DJs" or "producers". And then they're not songs, they're "tracks" or *shudder* "choons". Now there's nothing wrong with music that is danceable, but when that's the only focus, rather than creative expression, it generally sucks IMO.
I do like some techno--the darker stuff, and some dnb/breakbeat stuff is alright. I don't know if IDM or glitch is played at raves, but I like that stuff too. I only mention it because it's probably known to and listened to to some people who listen to...*sigh*...house/trance/hardcord/dnb/jungle/bre akbeat/etc. What would you like me to call all that type of music? Isn't there a super-genre that encompasses all that? I call it rave music because, as you've said, it's played at raves. At least I didn't refer to all that music as techno, like most people do. I know that calling all electronic dance music techno is like calling all rock heavy metal. I said rave music rather than that listing all the bajillions of genres included.
I'm not clueless about what is played about raves...what you listed is exactly what I had in mind. I just don't like the vast majority of it.
Re:in 1990 it ended because
by
Lord_Dweomer
·
· Score: 1
Ok, you don't like the majority of a type of music, that doesn't mean its bad music, it just means you have varying tastes.
There is unfortunately no overarching label for those types of music, and I tend to lump them all under the term Electronic Music because that is the broadest category they all fit into.
As to the people who make this music, they can indeed be musicians who create their own loops, but most are considered just producers. DJs don't create the music, they mix it. As to the songs being called tracks, or *shudders as well* choons, that is simply scene jargon, and they are in fact songs as well.
Re:in 1990 it ended because
by
thrash242
·
· Score: 1
If you like it, you like it, but I've just seen too much of an uncreative attitude about its creation from quite a few people. I mean, I realize that certain genres are generally certain tempos to aid in beatmatching by DJs, but I've heard people talking like a 120 BPM for a trance song or 160 for a jungle song are statutory, as well as the same basic structure, the same sounds, the same effects. I just don't like dance music. I like music for the mind. To me, trying to fit into happy-gabber-goa-techstep-hardcore or whatever and having to make it dancable is a limit on personal creativity.
Well, I have a problem with the term electronic music, because, as I've said, I have a problem with people thinking that all electronic music is the kind played at raves. And it's not. There are a lot of people who don't like the type of music mentioned above and assume all electronic music is dance music.
That' my definition of DJ as well, but people seem to call themselves and others who actually compose music (at least to some degree ie: using loops from other sources) DJs. To me a DJ plays prerecorded music (whether on vinyl, CD, or hard drive) and may or may not mix it into a unique performance. A musician, given some sort of noise-making device, creates music.
Slashdot Mirror
Why end at 1990? Did 120 years sound more rounded then 130? Haven't there been several advances made in recording technologies since then? MiniDisc, MP3, widespread adoption of compact discs, SACD. Fourteen years is a long time...
Nothing but the finest in meaningless drivel
And this web page has a list of music from the beginning of music to the present day. So what...?
Its a list of electronic Instruments (according to the Fscking Article). Slow news day?
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Gotta love thos hamster powered synthesisers
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
would Doctor Who, and bad Sci-fi movies have been without Where one of these for the sound effects?
it's 120 years of electronic musical instruments... For example, Steve Reich's Pendulum Music is pretty much electronic music, but doesn't involve an electronic musical instrument.
Modern Electronica, House, Techno, etc actually came from Detroit, Michigan, USA. THe Motor City. Every year there is the Detroit Electronic Music Festival.
Evolution or ID?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is the short form and the puristic style of thsi article inspired by a certain electronic song ("the robots")?
They list Steinberg, but ignored Native Instruments, the producer of Reaktor. Very incomplete.
or just a link of the day?
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
Might make a nice addition to the Wikipedia page on the same topic, with the author's permission, of course. Dunno why this is on the front page of Slashdot, though...
Discogs is my favorite source for info on electronic music.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Sorry but I'm not intrested in it... this is not geeky stuff at all! Please correct me if I'm wrong :-)
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
120 years of electronic music, and no mention of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen? How could they leave him out?
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
c-rock: Whatever happened to sex drugs and rock n roll? Now we just have aids crack and techno.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Far from all electronic music is rave "music". There is a lot of innovative stuff being made today. But, it's just like mainstream rock, rap, whatever...the most visible 90% of any music genre sucks. Of course, "electronic music" isn't a genre per se, it's the way it's made. Anyway, my point is: not all electronic music now is rave "music", just like not all electronic music in the 80s was New Wave.
I'm wondering why they didn't make it until 2000 and make it 130 years of electronic music? Well, the article is actually about instruments, not the actual music (from what I saw, anyway). But plenty of cool isntruments have come out since 1990; both software and hardware.
And I realize that your post was probably intended as humor, but I thought I'd point this out anyway.
Slashdot: News for God Knows Who. Stuff from the Very Distant Past... or from Yesterday's Slashdot.
So it's the Victorians who are to blame for techno handbag disco music! :-)
Stick Men
Interesting link, but it doesn't show how influcencial on electronic music each one was. That would be a very interesting stat. Eg. In most peoples minds, the Dr Who theme was the start of mainstream electronic music, but what inspired that?
This looks to be the oldest electronic instrument that is still regarlly used today... of particular note is the artist Goldfrapp who plays a theremin in a MOST provocative manner during her live gigs!
87 years is quite a respectable age. I can't see a date for electric guitar anywhere on the site.
also just got to love
do you think he had an advertising jingle?
The list has plenty of keyboard instruments but no mention of the electric guitar. The keyboard or the fingerboard are the input device. The sound is basically created electronically.
Yes, I know that the guitar strings vibrate but the sound is nothing like my acoustic guitar.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0108323/
Stylophone Rolf Harris Australia 1967
"Can you tell what it is yet?"
"No! It's just a fucking annoying buzzing noise!!"
Don't think he ever played it in a provocative manner though...
Maybe they update the page every 10 years or something. In 2008 they'll have coverage up through 2000 perhaps?
If they can cover up through 2004, probably one of the most important developments is software-based synthesizers, which either use totally new methods of synthesis (example: Antares Kantos) or emulate many of the older models on that list.
So there have been improvements in electronic music and synthesis in recent years, but nowadays everything is so electronic anyway that we don't hear anything and think "oh that's groundbreaking."
An analogy can be made with computer special FX. It's kind of like how the dinosaurs in the original Jurassic Park movie blew everybody away and were revolutionary back then. Now, over 10 years later, CG effects are 100 times better, but everybody is so used to CG effects by now that not a lot of it is revolutionary any more.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
I couldn't see any entry for Jarre's laser harp. Or modern 'software synths', many of which emulate 'old' dedicated hardware and substite for their antiquated predecessors.
Interesting that the vocoder, invented in 1940, is still being used to distort the vocals in some pop songs today.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
This mushroomed when I got an Atari ST - still the most influential machine for me. I got it for the games, but also spent time learning C on it and got into Steingberg Pro 12 - I bought the excellent for its time mono monitor, and never looked back.
Main inspiration for learning electronic music as a kid would be the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Always remembered for their Dr Who work, it's often forgotten that they did an awul lot more than this - the incidental music for the nature series Life On Earth was superb, and it's a track called The Astronauts (Through A Glass Darkly album, Peter Howell) which finally made me decide I wanted to play.
I've since decided to try learning piano as well as keyboard (very different - left hand work especially), but I'm essentially a keyboard player dabbling with piano, not a pianist dabbling with keyboards.
So, who else then? Any links to music? I've barely put online anything I did, but there's some really early teenage stuff from me and also a couple of ~1999 tracks available here. Don't laugh too loudly please...I've written better. Honest.
Cheers,
Ian
i want to make techno music on my PC. is there any software that will help me do this? how do the big name djs actually create their music? lots of hardware? thanks!
Hmm... could it be because Rock & Roll with a guy on a CASIO is just awkward?
Ugh, I hated that stuff.
I made some these bits of electronic music as far back as 1990, how come I'm not on the list?
Itch (commodore 64)
Sounds of Selene (c64, vocals)
A Ship Defines the Ocean (tape manipulations of guitar, keyboard, home-made wind instruments)
where there's fish, there's cats
What with the one liner? No link, no cheap stab at MS or Linux?
There should be a minimum lenght for news and comments, otherwise this place will look like a cheap blog... oh wait!
Nice overview, but why is the Fender Rhodes missing? It is an icon of its time (1970s).
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
Where can I get an Electronic Sackbut?
they don't have the tr-909 on the roland link! this drum machine along with the tr-808 and tb-303 have been and still are THE most important instruments in most acid and techno tracks.
For the site to be truly complete
it should provide famous music/musicians that
made the sound of some of this instruments
popular. The likes of:
Tomita
Jean Michelle Jarre
Kitaro
Vangelis
Mike Oldfield
Philip Glass
and of course
Tangerine Dream.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
Maybe you're being sarcastic, but you should check out the software "Reason" by Propellerheads Software.
Wash your mouth out with soap and water, sunny Jim!
Rock is proper music played on musical instruments.
Techno handbag disco music is just a noise that comes out of machines. And just look on your local high street on a Friday or Saturday night and see the barely-clad, drug-crazed, orange, under-age youngsters queuing up to get into over-priced night-clubs to techno handbag disco the night away and possibly later surrendering their bodies to the nearest sentient being wearing the right brand of training shoes.
Zombies.
Give me some good old-fashioned guitar-based rock any day. Slayer, Voivod or even Metallica if things get desperate.
Remember kids, God gave Rock'N'Roll to you.
Stick Men
I also recommend FruityLoops for making drum loops, if you feel like it.
---
"I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Have you ever heard of an Acoustic/Electric guitar?
That is an acoustic guitar with a pickup. You can hook it up to an amplifier, and the sound coming out of the amp will be pretty much the same as that coming out of the soundhole, just louder.
An electric guitar generates sound by the same mechanism as an acoustic - the vibration of strings induces a corresponding vibration in the body of the guitar via the bridge. The body of the guitar moves air, a.k.a makes sound waves. In the case of an electric guitar, the vibration of the strings also induces a current in the electromagnetic pickups, which is fed to an amplifier where it is translated into sound.
The reason your electric guitar sounds different than your acoustic is the same reason a mandolin sounds different than your guitar - they are shaped differently, have different densities, and are made of different materials, which affects the way sound moves through them.
Sleep is futile.
It should go right upto present day with the likes of 'Aphex Twin', pushing the boundries of electronic sounds.
IIRC the theremin is the only musical instrument that can be played without the musician actually touching it.
(ignoring for a moment the bothersome little detail of whether the electrical field surrounding the instrument is part of the instrument itself)
When were the old player pianos invented with the roll that you put into the piano and use the pedals to hear the song?
Wouldn't it be digital since it's just a piece of paper with a hole or no hole for one or zero?
Great guide. Recommended.
how can anyone have an article on electronic music and not mention kraftwerk? helloooo? not a very credible article imho without it...
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
if anyone wants to rebut my previous statement, let me follow that up with this:
naming the article 120 years of electronic music and not having kraftwerk is like having an article named 500 years of classical music and not having mozart or beethoven...sure they didnt create their instruments, but they sure as shit made it popular...
they should rename the article to 120 years of electronic music inventors...
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
You need to read the W3C's standard on linking pages. It should be "this web page has a list of music from blah to blah." to comply with standards.
Modern Electronic music frequently features the 'acid' sound which was originally introduced to the Chicago House scene when some producers dicovered the Roland TB 303 automated bass synthesiser and sequencer. It was a pretty cheap piece of equipment and it never sold well. Most of them ended up discarded or in garage sales..... they only sold 20,000 over the 18 months that it was available. It didn't sound anything like that bass guitar it was supposed to be replacing. However, the pioneering house music producers discovered that if the resonance and accent controls were turned up higher than any sane user had tried before then it produced a distinctive sound. Add some simple sequencing to som knob twiddling, lay it over a drum beat and *bang* that's where acid house came from. The page does have a link which has a photo of the tiny machine, but you should check out this page for a more detailed history of this accident in electronic music evolution.
You can debunk the research these guys did for their list with about 5 minutes of Googling.
Seastead this.
> ...the barely-clad, drug-crazed, orange, under-age youngsters... Zombies.
> Give me some good old-fashioned guitar-based rock any day. Slayer, Voivod or even Metallica...
Do you really want to hold up metal fans as exemplars? LOL! You obviously haven't seen Heavy Metal Parking Lot or even The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years.
For the record, I like both metal and techno.
i'm sure they're must be other bands out there doing new stuff with strange old equipment... reply if you know any good ones!
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
The site would is kinda neat, but claiming it's covering electronic music and not the history of electronic music technology is misleading. You couldn't cover the history of rock and roll by listing guitar improvements, either :P
Where's the Sal-Mar Construction, created by Salvatore Martirano in the early 1970's, toured throughout the world in the 70's and 80's, and still seen as one of the most interesting improvisatory electronics instrument ever devised? How about one of the first wave synthesizers by James Beauchamp in the 1960's? The page also seems to include some software systems as instruments (as it should), but leaves out most such systems (CMusic, Music V, CSound, Music 4C, max, kyma, etc.). This is a pretty bad /. post.
2. Around 1990 is when desktop computers were finally strong enough to do basic synthesis and sampling. At that point the writing was on the wall: the age of hardware synthesis was doomed - it would eventually go software, and the results have been impressive. For example: Propellerhead's REASON provides more synthesis power than any reasonable human being could have afforded in 1990. You want 11 samplers in a rack? In 1990, it would have cost $11,000. With REASON, it's just 11 mouse clicks on a $350 piece of software on a $600 computer.
You want echo an each? That would have been another $5000. Ooops - big mistake? You're stuck with $16,000 of gear. In REASON, you simply select all and hit delete.
For all the crowing of the mystical qualities of a specific synthesizer's analogue wonderments, the simple fact is this: software synthesis is vastly cheaper. Today you can go out and blow thousands on a (brand x) synthesizer or hundreds on (brand y) software. The consolidations in the synth industry confirm all of this.
In the early 1980s there were many many manufacturers. Now there are a handful. This number will continue to reduce as hardware becomes increasingly irrelevant for sound production. At the same time intuitive control surfaces that simultaneously operate in open standards of MIDI and closed standards of dedicated software synthesis will be the next wave of the future in hardware synthesizer manufacture.
I'm on the inside of this, so believe me: it's all true. I'm not joking and it's happening NOW.
HW
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
for some new electronic music, you should check out my new band 'daydreamer', a fully original collaborative project between dj isis and kruhft from vancouver, bc. The new site with the first 4 track release (mp3 and ogg available) called the 'what happened 2 ep' can be found at:
.at. hotmail .dot. com
http://www.daydreamer.dynalias.net
if any of you have radio stations and enjoy the tracks feel free to add them to your playlists. if you do, i would appreciate an email so i can add your station to my own personal playlist and links section for the site (when i make it).
contact: kruhft
"This web page has a list of 120 years of electronic music from 1870 to 1990."
So has Slashdot come to the point where a link in a one sentence description constitutes a submission?
I see the future submissions:
This web page has news.
This web page has links to news
This web page has pr0n.
Specifically because Ishkur is downright unabashedly nasty towards certain styles of Electronica; specifically Trance music and the commercialization / "dumbing-down" that it has seen over the past decade. Some subgenres of Trance emerge unscarred by Ishkur's wrath, but not many.
Some people seem to take personal offense to Ishkur's decrying of their favorite kind of music, and are rather vocal in letting him know (see the reader mail pages on his site, and for some more laughs search the threads at www.tranceaddict.com for "Ishkur"). I think the disclaimer there is just an attempt by Ish to "head them off at the pass" so to speak; Ishkur is sorta just saying "take this as you will and leave me the hell alone".
With that said... I have been frequenting Ishkur's site for a few years now and those "biases" he mentions in his disclaimer are, for the most part adquately explained by Ishkur and (I've come to see over the years) well deserved.
Of course, maybe all that was pretty clear beforehand to the crowd here and I'm just being CaptainObvious today
If the distorted guitar counts as electronic music then Link Wray deserves a mention for "Rumble" arguably the first commercial tune to exploit the sound of a distorted overamplified guitar (in 1958 no less). He was an influence on The Who and many other "heavy" guitar-oriented bands, and in some ways is the father of heavy metal. See also http://www.oldies.com/artist/view.cfm/id_323.html
Daisy... Daisy...
give me an answer...do...
I'm half... crazy...
all for the...
love...
...
of
...
...
you...
...
a small programming language [iolanguage.com]
If you read "Advanced Programming Languages", by Raphael A. Finkel, there already was a language named Io, much more advant garde, if nearly unimplementable and unprogramable.
Corrugated Tunnel
I can't see a date for electric guitar anywhere on the site.i c-guitar+do wney-california+Paul-Bigsby
http://www.google.com/search?&q=electr
gewg_
Unlikely as it may seem, William Duddell's singing arc has an important place in wireless history. It was based on the carbon arc lamp, invented by Sir Humphrey Davy in the 1840s and which became popular in the 1850s, prior to the invention of the incandescent lamp. The arc lamp employed two carbon rods which, when brought together and then separated, produced a brilliant white light.
Unfortunately, it also produced a lot of audio noise (hissing, spitting, and whistling), which limited its use to outdoor lighting. Tesla and JJ Thompson independently designed high-frequency ac alternators to try to overcome this noise, with limited success (although the alternator technology became useful later for long wave wireless transmitters).
Duddell found that, by placing a capacitor in parallel to the arc, he could change the noise into a more-or-less pure tone, and he could adjust the pitch of the tone by adjusting the value of the capacitor. He created a musical instrument by connecting several of these oscillators to a keyboard, and toured Europe as a travelling novelty act.
The Dane Valdemar Poulsen began experimenting with Duddell's arc in 1902. He found that the frequency of oscillation could be greatly increased by operating the arc in a hydrogen atmosphere (!), and that both the frequency of oscillation and the efficiency could be improved by placing a magnetic field perpendicular to the arc. He was able to move the frequency high enough to make Duddell's singing arc a useful wireless transmitter; in fact, it was the first negative resistance, continuous-wave oscillator ever made. (Spark transmitters produce a damped wave.)
The U.S. rights to Poulsen's arc transmitter were purchased in 1909 and were used by the Federal Telegraph Company to make extremely powerful wireless transmitters--1 megawatt transmitters were delivered to the U.S. Navy by 1918. However, by that time short waves, which the arc transmitter could not make efficiently, became more practical for long-distance communication, and the vacuum tube led to the demise of arc transmitter technology. There were, however, several interesting threads that continued on:
--Valdemar Poulsen also invented the "telegraphone," the first magnetic wire recorder
--The Federal Telegraph Company hired Lee DeForest to work on receivers for its stations; while there, he invented the triode vacuum tube
--Peter V. Jensen left Federal to invent the loudspeaker; formed the Magnavox Corporation
--In the 1930s, unused magnetic pole pieces from a scrapped 1 megawatt arc transmitter were scavenged by Prof. Ernest O. Lawrence at the University of California at Berkeley, and used to make the first cyclotron subatomic particle accelerator.
So William Duddell's singing arc had quite a legacy!
And hardly any "rave music" is actually played at real underground raves. The DJs have better taste than that and are playing some of the best sounding house, jungle, trance, breaks, DnB, techno, or w/e tracks out there.
"Rave music" is a mislabeled genre that seeks to catch on to the popularity of the rave scene, but is in fact complete shit that you usually only hear in cheesy clubs that cater to teeny boppers who have no real clue what the rave scene is really like. Sad really.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
They had electrons in 1870?
Fuck it
house/jungle/trance/breaks/dnb/techno is all what I consider rave music. It's exactly what I was referring to when I said "rave music". What did you think I was talking about when I said rave music? Kylie Minogue? Madonna? I'm familiar with the most basic of the zillions of dance music genres out there and I don't like about 98% of it. It's so forumlaic it's sad. My point is *all* that is dance music that is typically played at raves. There is a whole other world of electronic music out there besides that. Thanks for helping me prove my point.
Music involving any 'overdubbing' is sound sculpture as opposed to creation at one time under a clock. Jazz is music created at once. Pop rock / since Pet Sounds Sgt Pepper etc ... is music created slowly like painting. This includes all hiphop dance related musics of the 80s 90s.
Article \.ed all day but I thought I'd give my 2c.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
... it *was* Star Wars. Where the hell did I get Blake's 7 from?
Gardner Post and I have recently finished our first Video Baby Grand Piano, featuring a pair of MIDI-enabled turntables driving a pair of XP DV machines running ScratchTV, a QuickTime application for scratching video. The project is part of ongogin efforts to create psyschedelic dance-able video music. http://www.gregdeocampo.com/2430E7EC365A446581D623 C20F2724D1/page/display.asp?id=579
/* http://www.gregdeocampo.com */
There is an actual genre called Rave Music, which is much of that pop crap, and some of the really bad stuff that sounds similar to trance, house, etc.
It is its own separate genre, and sees almost zero playtime at real underground raves.
You are free to consider the genre whatever you want, but you will be wrong on a lot of accounts.
The good stuff, which any good DJ will spin, is not so formulaic as to be offputting, and if it is very formulaic, the skills of the DJ are even more important because they can mix it into something better.
I am well aware of how vast the electronic music world is, but I wanted to correct your misguided notion of what is actually played at raves since you really do seem clueless.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I have never heard of "rave music" as a specific genre. I was talking about suff that is played at raves, and to a lesser extent electronic dance music in general. I was referring to trance/house/jungle/d'n'b/hardcore/breakbeat/techn o/etc. I don't like about 95% of that stuff. To me it's mostly uncreative fluff that is made to be danced to, not appreciated as music. Even people who make it don't call themselves musicians. They're "DJs" or "producers". And then they're not songs, they're "tracks" or *shudder* "choons". Now there's nothing wrong with music that is danceable, but when that's the only focus, rather than creative expression, it generally sucks IMO.
e akbeat/etc. What would you like me to call all that type of music? Isn't there a super-genre that encompasses all that? I call it rave music because, as you've said, it's played at raves. At least I didn't refer to all that music as techno, like most people do. I know that calling all electronic dance music techno is like calling all rock heavy metal. I said rave music rather than that listing all the bajillions of genres included.
I do like some techno--the darker stuff, and some dnb/breakbeat stuff is alright. I don't know if IDM or glitch is played at raves, but I like that stuff too. I only mention it because it's probably known to and listened to to some people who listen to...*sigh*...house/trance/hardcord/dnb/jungle/br
I'm not clueless about what is played about raves...what you listed is exactly what I had in mind. I just don't like the vast majority of it.
There is unfortunately no overarching label for those types of music, and I tend to lump them all under the term Electronic Music because that is the broadest category they all fit into.
As to the people who make this music, they can indeed be musicians who create their own loops, but most are considered just producers. DJs don't create the music, they mix it. As to the songs being called tracks, or *shudders as well* choons, that is simply scene jargon, and they are in fact songs as well.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
If you like it, you like it, but I've just seen too much of an uncreative attitude about its creation from quite a few people. I mean, I realize that certain genres are generally certain tempos to aid in beatmatching by DJs, but I've heard people talking like a 120 BPM for a trance song or 160 for a jungle song are statutory, as well as the same basic structure, the same sounds, the same effects. I just don't like dance music. I like music for the mind. To me, trying to fit into happy-gabber-goa-techstep-hardcore or whatever and having to make it dancable is a limit on personal creativity.
Well, I have a problem with the term electronic music, because, as I've said, I have a problem with people thinking that all electronic music is the kind played at raves. And it's not. There are a lot of people who don't like the type of music mentioned above and assume all electronic music is dance music.
That' my definition of DJ as well, but people seem to call themselves and others who actually compose music (at least to some degree ie: using loops from other sources) DJs. To me a DJ plays prerecorded music (whether on vinyl, CD, or hard drive) and may or may not mix it into a unique performance. A musician, given some sort of noise-making device, creates music.