Electroacoustic music originated in Western art music during its modern era following the incorporation of electric sound production into compositional practice. The initial developments in electroacoustic music composition during the mid-20th century are associated with the activities of composers that were based at research studios in Europe and America at that time. These include the Groupe de Recherches Musicales at the ORTF in Paris, the home of musique concrete, the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) studio in Cologne, where the focus was on the composition of elektronische Musik, and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York, where tape music, electronic music, and computer music were all explored.
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Most standard music history and reference texts date the formal birth of electroacoustic music to the late 1940s and early 1950s, and in particular to the work of two groups of composers whose æsthetic orientations were radically opposed: a Paris based collective centred around the practice of Musique Concrete and a group in Cologne who began experimenting with elektronische Musik. But isolated examples of the use of electroacoustic and prerecorded music exist that pre-date such developments. Ottorino Respighi used an (acoustical) phonograph recording of a nightingale’s song in his orchestral work The Pines of Rome in 1924, before the introduction of electrical record players; experimental filmmaker Walter Ruttmann created Weekend, a sound collage on an optical soundtrack in 1930; and John Cage used phonograph recordings of test tones mixed with live instruments in Imaginary Landscape no. 1 (1939), among other examples. In the first half of the Twentieth Century, a number of writers also advocated the use of electronic sound sources for composition, notably Ferruccio Busoni, Luigi Russolo, and Edgard Varèse, and electronic performing instruments were invented, such as the Theremin in 1919, and the Ondes Martenot in 1928.
Tape music is a form of music which began soon after tape recording was invented, as people could now create sounds that were for the first time identical with each performance. Users of this new technology began to develop a new musical ethic around the idea of the created artificial sound; as now music no longer had to be related to live performance of instruments, but now, the recording itself is the performance. Electroacoustic music and particularly musique concrète made extensive use of magnetic tape, so much that the terms "tape music" and "musique concrete" were sometimes used interchangeably, though, strictly speaking, they are not necessarily the same thing.
Before recording technology, "music" referred only to live music. So when the recording media first appeared, the transformation of the music paradigm was profound. The experience of listening to music was seldom repetitive before recording, unlike listening to a tape which is more or less identical at each hearing. In addition, this experience is also shared by everyone who listens to the same recording, making commonality of message and musical experience a unifying social ritual for the first time.
Holmes (2008) cites the work of Halim El-Dabh as perhaps the earliest example of tape music. El-Dabh's The Expression of Zaar, first presented in Cairo, Egypt in 1944, but now lost, was an early work using musique concréte like techniques similar to those developed in Paris during the same period. El-Dabh would later become more famous for his work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where in 1959 he composed the influential piece Leiyla and the Poet (Holmes 2008, 153–54 & 157).
US composer John Cage's assembly of the Williams Mix serves as an example of the rigors of tape music. First, Cage created a 192-page score. Over the course of a year, 600 sounds were assembled and recorded. Cut tape segments for each occurrence of each sound were accumulated on the score. Then the cut segments were spliced to one of eight tapes, work finished on January 16, 1953. The premiere performance (realization) of the 4'15" work was given on March 21, 1953 at the University of Illinois, Urbana.[1]
The underlying philosophy of tape music spawned a whole new direction in musicianship, and music styles that would follow. Electronic music, electronica, New Age, hip hop and other incarnations are direct descendants of the original tape music philosophy.
The musique concrète group was centered in Paris and was pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer; their music was based on the juxtaposition and transformation of natural sounds (meaning real, recorded sounds, not necessarily those made by natural forces) recorded to tape or disc.
In Cologne, elektronische Musik, pioneered in 1949–51 by the composer Herbert Eimert and the physicist Werner Meyer-Eppler, was based solely on electronically generated (synthetic) sounds, particularly sine waves (Eimert 1957, 2; Morawska-Büngeler 1988, 11–13; Ungeheuer 1992, 13). The beginning of the development of electronic music has been traced back to “the invention of the valve [vacuum tube] in 1906” (Eimert 1957, 2). The precise control afforded by the studio allowed for what Eimert considered to be the subjection of everything, “to the last element of the single note”, to serial permutation, “resulting in a completely new way of composing sound” (Eimert 1957, 8); in the studio, serial operations could be applied to elements such as timbre and dynamics. The common link between the two schools is that the music is recorded and performed through loudspeakers, without a human performer. While serialism has been largely abandoned in electroacoustic circles, the majority of electroacoustic pieces use a combination of recorded sound and synthesized or processed sounds, and the schism between Schaeffer’s and Eimert’s approaches has been overcome, the first major example being Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge of 1955–56 (Morawska-Büngeler 1988, 17; Stockhausen 1996, 93–94).
All electroacoustic music is made with electronic technology. Some electroacoustic compositions make use of sounds not available to typical acoustic instruments, such as those used in a traditional orchestra. The interaction between sounds and the ways they are transfigured over time has been termed “spectromorphology” by the composer Denis Smalley (Smalley 1997).
Electroacoustic as a term applied to describe musical instruments can mean that the sound of the instrument is generated acoustically, by strings for example, but that there is no traditional acoustic sound box. Amplification is accomplished through electronic pickups and amplifiers. Design of these instruments are typically cut down and very minimal and may consist of only a fingerboard, bridge, and tuning machines. The term electroacoustic can also mean that the instrument can be played either electrically or acoustically as in hollow body electric guitars. Both systems of amplification exist simultaneously in the same instrument and it will work well either way.
Audio feedback is a special kind of feedback which occurs when a sound loop exists between an audio input (for example, a microphone or guitar pickup) and an audio output (for example, a loudspeaker). While audio feedback is usually undesirable, it has entered into musical history as a desired effect beginning in the early 1960s. It is now well associated with the history of rock music where electric guitar players such as Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix have used it extensively. Some of the earliest users of guitar feedback were 1950s musicians with Albert Collins, Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Guitar Slim all independently recording and publishing music featuring that effect. Outside of the rock tradition, an early user of feedback was the contemporary American composer Robert Ashley who first used feedback as sound material in his work Wolfman (1964).
Circuit bending is the creative short-circuiting of low voltage, battery-powered electronic audio devices such as guitar effects, children’s toys and small synthesizers to create new musical instruments and sound generators. Emphasizing spontaneity and randomness, the techniques of circuit bending have been commonly associated with noise music, though many more conventional contemporary musicians and musical groups have been known to experiment with “bent” instruments (Collins 2006,).
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Important centers of research and composition can be found around the world, and there are numerous conferences and festivals which present electroacoustic music, notably the International Computer Music Conference, the International Conference on New interfaces for musical expression, the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Festival (Bourges, France), and the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, Austria).
A number of national associations promote the art form, notably the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC) in Canada, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) in the US, the Australasian Computer Music Association in Australia and New Zealand, and Sound and Music (previously the Sonic Arts Network) in the UK. The Computer Music Journal and Organised Sound are the two most important peer-reviewed journals dedicated to electroacoustic studies, while several national associations produce print and electronic publications.
Alongside paper presentations, workshops and seminars, many of these events also feature concert performances or sound installations created by those attending or which are related to the theme of the conference / symposium.
See also the “Electroacoustic Bibliography” published in eContact! 8.4 — Ressources éducatives / Educational Resources (Montréal: CEC) for an annotated “‘essential reading list’ for electroacoustics, including books, journals and other resources relating to electroacoustics”.
See also the “Electroacoustic Bibliography” published in eContact! 8.4 — Ressources éducatives / Educational Resources (Montréal: CEC) for an annotated list of journals publishing articles related to electroacoustics.
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