The History and Role of Technology in Music

Since the dawn of the 20th century, humanity has witnessed scientific and technological advancements in every aspect of life including music. New inventions, innovations, and the constant evolution of techniques and approaches to composition are a crucial part of the composer’s toolbox in the 21st century.

The debut of electronic music using instruments such as the Ondes Martenot, and the Theremin in 1928 used by composers Messiaen and others exposed people to what music might look like in the future.

Electronic music developed further in Europe post World War 2 with two trends: Musique Concrète and Electronische Musik. Musique Concrète was based in Paris and pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995) and his contemporaries. It involved recording natural sounds on tape and then manipulation in different ways: reversing the tape, adding reverberation, changing the playback speed, processing the sound through filters, and other techniques.1 Further developments in tape music occurred in other parts of both Europe and North America.

The other trend, Electronische Musik, was led by Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 – 2007) in 1953 Germany. This was music produced by electric generators. An oscillator could generate one of several different waveforms, which could then be subjected to manipulation similar to that of Musique Concrète. These components would fuse into a single console with a keyboard interface, which would become the basis of the modern-day synthesizer. Stockhausen became known as the “father of electronic music.”

His Electronic Studies, in particular no. 2 (1954) was the first electronic work that consisted of pure sine tones. Each sound was made from 5 different pitches, spaced in equal intervals across the entire audio range. The timbres were organized using ordered sets (hence serialism). This demonstrated his ability to combine serial sequencing techniques with concrete and synthetic textures. It was a milestone not only in Stockhausen’s early work but also in modern electronic music.

The first synthesizers were overpriced, very large and prevented many institutions from purchasing their own. Composers did not want to travel far to conduct their work. It was not until the 1960s that Robert Moog (American engineer) and Donald Buchla (American inventor) both collaborated to provide more compact and affordable synthesizers for composers to use. Instead of using bulky vacuum tubes like the first RCA synthesizer (1955), the new Moog synthesizer relied on transistor technology, which took a fraction of the space required to accommodate it.

Wendy Carlos (b. 1939), an American composer, released her debut album Switched-On Bach to the public in 1968. Switched-On Bach is an electronic work that consists of performance of ten works of Johann Sebastian Bach with the use of the Moog synthesizer, which later became popular thanks to this work. Not only did Wendy Carlos bring popularity to the Moog synthesizer but did as much to bring the music of Bach to the modern era as Mendelssohn did when he first revived Bach’s music for the first time in the Romantic era. Carlos’ later compositions explored concepts such as alternate tuning systems, ambient music, and surround sound. Her music can be heard on the soundtrack of films (Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining). She was an important figure in the development of using technology in music. She inspired generations of musicians after her, especially transgender ones, to pursue careers in music.2

In 1983, Yamaha released one of their best-selling synthesizers of all time, the Yamaha DX7. This synthesizer featured a newly developed standard communications protocol: MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). This allowed the synthesizer to communicate with other devices and instruments. All new synthesizers that were released after the DX7 had MIDI built into it. It also featured frequency modulation (FM) synthesis, a technique that involves the use of a series of sine-wave generators acting upon each other to produce different waveforms. This had already been developed in the mid-1960s, but at the time it was not yet made into a commercially feasible product. By the mid-1980s synthesizers were capable of digital sampling (a method of digitizing short audio samples) and could recreate realistic sounds such as a grand piano, trumpet, violin, bird call, car crash, or any other sounds, and thus were affordable to the average musician.3

The American military used computers since the Second World War, but were not available to the public until around the 1980s. Max Matthews pioneered research in using a computer to synthesize sounds at Bell Laboratories in the 1950s. Many composers since then have turned to computer synthesis to aid in composing. More recently, artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to create compositions in the styles of great masters such as Bach and Mozart.

Paul Lansky (b. 1944) is an American composer who is regarded as a pioneer in digital sound synthesis and a prominent figure in the world of computer music. He uses “real world” sounds in his computer works: kids in the kitchen, traffic, musical instruments, and most importantly, speech. He developed several sound manipulation processes as well as computer programs and software including the popular and widely used CMIX. Lansky first embraced computer-aided composition fully in 1985 with the completion of the first of his “Chatter” works: Idle Chatter. It was followed by the sequels just_more_idle_chatter (1987) and Notjustmoreidlechatter (1988). The latter, for computer-synthesized tape, uses a technique called Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) in the creation of his work. This

type of sound analysis is used in the telephone industry to handle large amounts of data by reducing it as much as possible.4 In the beginning, the listener is hit with a wash of fast chatter set to a basic harmonic progression in G minor. At one point, the chatter thins out such that the individual words are almost discernible before the unintelligible world of chatter comes in again. The work pushes boundaries and expands the possibilities in computer music and speech synthesis from the difficult-to-understand serial methods of past composers to a kind of music that all listeners could enjoy.

To conclude, technology has had a significant impact on the music of the Information Age, without which the music we listen to today would be very different. Music would not have evolved from the music heard over a hundred years ago. The next time you hear a modern piece of music, think about how far music has come since then.

1 From The Enjoyment of Music, 9th edition, Machlis and Forney, pages 673 to 682.

2 From How Wendy Carlos pioneered the evolution of synths - Blog | Splice. (n.d.).

https://splice.com/blog/who-is-wendy-carlos/

3 From The Enjoyment of Music, 9th edition, Machlis and Forney, pages 673 to 682

4 From Notjustmoreidlechatter, for computer synthesized tape | AllMusic. (2024). AllMusic; AllMusic.

https://www.allmusic.com/composition/notjustmoreidlechatter-for-computer-synthesized-tape-mc0 002380146

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