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The University High School Band
The History and Theory of Music

Electronic Music

Advances in technology have always 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.

Compositions

Prelude and Outer Space (Bernard Herrman)

Notjustmoreidlechatter (Paul Lansky)

Snowflakes Are Dancing (Isao Tomita)

Axel F (Harold Faltermeyer)

Open-Ended Question

Does generating sounds electronically count as playing a musical instrument?