Electron music is music developed with the introduction of electric musical instruments and electrical technologies (since the last decades of the XX century - computer technologies). As a specific purpose in the world of music, electric music took shape in the 2nd half of the 20th century and by the beginning of the 21st century spread widely in the academic and global culture.
Electric music operates with sounds that are ready to emit electrical and electromechanical musical instruments, as well as sounds generated with the support of electrical / electrical devices and a different family of transducers (tape recorders, generators, computer sound cards, pickups and the like), which are not seriously considered musical instruments.
Until the last thirty percent of the 20th century, electric music was associated, in a key way, with experiments (as in the USSR, for example, and abroad) in academic music, but this state of affairs changed with the establishment of the serial production of sound synthesizers in the 1970s. Thanks to their own reasonable price, synthesizers have become available to the general public. This changed the type of famous music - synthesizers were used by almost all jazz, rock and pop musicians. At the beginning of the 21st century, electric music incorporates a wide range of styles and genres - from individual avant-garde experiments to widely replicated applied music.
Origin: cover of the 19th and early 20th centuries
The likelihood of recording sounds is often associated with the thought of making electrical music. But this does not mean, in fact, that making electric music is considered the goal of the recording process.
In 1857, the French publisher and bookseller Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville patented the device he had invented - the phonoautograph.
The phonautograph was the first device that allowed recording sounds, but could not reproduce them.
In 1878, South American inventor Thomas A. Edison patented the phonograph. Edison's phonograph, like Scott's phonoautograph, used cylinders to record sounds, but, unlike the phonoautograph, the sound could be recorded, for example, and reproduced.
Telharmonium, Thaddeus Cahill, 1897
In 1887, South American inventor Emil Berliner suggested his discovery - the disc phonograph.
In 1906, a solid discovery was noticed that had a profound impact on the development of electric music. It was a triode tube amplifier (audion), created by the South American inventor Lee de Forest. It was the 1st electric lamp, consisting of a glass vessel with a hot cathode inside, which allowed the production and amplification of electronic signals. The discovery of the electric lamp gave rise to the existence of radio broadcasting and made the emergence of electrical computational processes possible.
Long before electric music was noticed, composers had a desire to apply renewed emerging technologies for musical purposes.
A number of tools were created, in whose systems they were applied as mechanical, for example, electrical elements. It was these tools that paved the way for more ideal power tools.
In the period from 1898 to 1912, South American inventor Tadeusz Cahill worked on the creation of an electromechanical instrument called Telharmonium (English Telharmonium). But this instrument was not found due to its size: its 1906 version weighed about 200 tons, its device occupied an area of approximately 18 m².
The theremin is considered to be the first electrical tool. Theremin was created by the Russian inventor Lev Theremin approximately in 1919-1920. This is an instrument in which the sound is produced by moving the performer's hands against the electric background of 2 iron antennas.
Earlier electric instruments also include: the sound cross (fr. Croix Sonore), invented in 1926 by the Russian composer Nikolai Obukhov, and the Waves Martenot, invented by the French musician Maurice Martenot in the period from 1919 to 1928. The most familiar example of the use of Martenot Waves is Olivier Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony and his other fantasies. The Wave Martenot instrument was also used to write music by other composers, mostly French, for example, André Jolivet.
A sketch of the fresh aesthetics of musical art
In 1907, just a year after the invention of the audion, Ferruccio Busoni publishes a treatise "A sketch of a fresh aesthetics of musical art" (German: "Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst"), in which he assesses the likelihood of using electro and other sound sources in the music of the future. He hoped, in fact, that in the future the octave would be split into more semitones than the traditional tuning, in which the octave is produced from 12 semitones, would invite, and this would be quite likely thanks to the Cahill dynamophone: “Only a long and painstaking series of experiments, and unchanging hearing training undoubtedly pwill help the new generation arrange it