Electronic Music
The 20th & 21st Centuries
John Naclerio, CC BY-SA 4.0
One good aspect of the Cold War was the competition it spurred between the United States and the Soviet Union in the area of science and technology. Working for Germany during World War II, a scientist named Wernher von Braun had invented a guided ballistic missile called the V-2, the first rocket to leave Earth's atmosphere. After the war, both the Americans and Russians secretly moved German scientists and researchers to their own countries to exploit this technical expertise. Both sides hoped to gain the prestige and tactical advantage of being the first country to control outer space.
The Russians scored the first victory on October 4, 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to achieve Earth orbit. Just a month later, Laika, a stray dog from Moscow, became the first living creature to travel to space. Three years later, on April 12, 1961, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human space traveller.
The United States lagged behind the Soviet Union at every stage of the early space race, but spurred on by President Kennedy's goal to land a man on the Moon before the end of the decade, soon passed the Russians. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created, launching the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the Moon. A total of twelve Americans would step onto the lunar surface over the next three years. Considering the space race lost, the Soviets never followed.
Beyond the prestige of human achievement, the space race resulted in many technological innovations, such as satellites for telecommunications, surveillance, and weather forecasting; computer software systems; freeze-drying and water filtration; satellite dishes and improved long-distance communication; cordless power tools; smoke detectors; magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CAT scans); robots and joystick control systems.
As always, advances in technology impacted music. Every musical instrument is a work of technology. The invention of the microphone in 1877 and the gramophone ten years later had already forever changed the way people listen to music. Soon, inventors were developing electronic instruments like the teleharmonium or the ondes martenot. One of the most recognizable of these early electronic instruments was the ætherphone, more commonly called the theremin. Created in 1920 by Russian inventor Léon Theremin, it is a radioelectric instrument that generates sound by changing the frequency of radio feedback when the player moves his hands close to its antenna.
Throughout the twentieth century, composers with technical expertise experimented with ways of electronically manipulating sounds or mixing live performances with pre-recorded material. The most significant advance in electronic instrument technology was the invention of the sampler, which allows a performer to play pre-recorded sounds of acoustic instruments, and the synthesizer, which generates all manner of new sounds electronically.
In the 1980s, the American engineer Dave Smith created Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or "MIDI," a computer language that records the frequency, duration, and velocity (volume) of notes and became the technical standard for electronic instruments and music software. Today, composers seamlessly integrate electronic sounds and effects into their compositions, and the possibilities and potentialities this opens have only begun to be explored.