Something Completely Different

For me, it was Sparks releasing the album "Number One Song I Heaven" in 1979.  It took disco beats and morphed them with rock songs.

Here is the title track.

One more...

Electronic music has been around since the invention of the first electronic instruments circa the 1920s such as the theremin, ondes martenot and trautonium. Some consider precursors to have existed even earlier. I'll post some more really early stuff when I get home from an errand.

Yeah I would have to agree. Prog bands were doing really weird things with electronic music in the 1960s too.

While I'm at it, let me shoehorn in an article I wrote on early synthesiser music some time back...

Part I: Room for Improvement - Size Matters

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/Thaddeus_Cahill.jpeg/440px-Thaddeus_Cahill.jpeg)
You might, or might not, be surprised to find that the history of the synthesiser - or at least, the electric organ - goes back to the last years of the nineteenth century, when inventor Thaddeus Cahill (1867 - 1934) built what is widely regarded as the world's first electronic instrument, which he called the telharmonium, or the dynamophone. It was not quite what you would call portable, weighing in at approximately seven tons for the "lite" model, going all the way up to 200 tons for the top of the range, nor was it easily affordable to probably anyone other than the president of the United States, with a price tag of $200,000, which was massive money for then, about $5.5 million today. Yeah. Not the kind of thing you asked Santa to bring you for Christmas!
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Teleharmonium1897.jpg)
It will however come as no surprise then that it was less than wildly successful, in fact only three models were ever built, and none sold. The telharmonium used telephone wires in order to transmit its music, and a primitive form of loudspeaker involving paper cones connected to telephone receivers. It was absolutely massive, taking up a whole room, and as vacuum tubes had yet to be invented, it relied on huge electric dynamos (hence its alternate name, one assumes) which consumed masses of power in order to generate the music. In addition, as no real thought seems to have been given to a way to isolate the telharmonium's signal, its music often merged with the conversation of people on phone lines, making a strange mixture of voices and weird electronic music. No doubt some callers thought their telephones were haunted!

Perhaps it might come as a shock to discover that the telharmonium was a polyphonic instrument, which I personally think is pretty amazing, given that it was the first electronic one too. However it was not to be the trailblazer its inventor had intended it to be, and didn't even retain interest as a curiosity, Cahill's younger brother receiving precisely no responses to his ebay advert: "free to good home, the first telharmonium. Weighs 7 ton, will run on a charge of 671 kilowatts." Heavy metal, indeed.

Whether the stupendous lack of success the telharmonium had was to blame and scared off other inventors from making forays into this arena, or for some other reason, but the world would have to wait another thirty years before anything even slightly similar came on the market. When two more or less made the same bid for glory at the same time, both inventors had learned lessons from Cahill's massive white elephant, and their machines were much more manageable. And affordable. I'm not sure which came first, as both seem to have been invented in 1928, so I'll just go alphabetically.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/Vellones_et_martenot.jpg/440px-Vellones_et_martenot.jpg)
Maurice Martenot (1898 - 1980)

This time it was a musician who invented the thing. Maurice Martenot was a French cellist, but like Cahill had experience with radio, having been an operator in World War I. I see here that though he invented the ondes Martnot in 1928 he did not perfect it for another ten years, so that would probably put him behind our next candidate. Still, for now let's stick with him. His invention, as I just said, was called the ondes Martenot, and this is it.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Ondes_martenot.jpg/440px-Ondes_martenot.jpg)
As you can see, it's already far closer to what we would consider an organ, even a piano or harpsichord, than was the behemoth Cahill tried to unleash on the world. Sort of like, I guess, the personal computer following those huge room-filling monsters they had in the forties and fifties, with punched-cards and spinning reels of tape. Yes, much more like it. The name, apparently, means "Martenot waves", though he did also call it the less grandiose ondes musicales, "musical waves". As you can hear in the video below, it doesn't however sound like any organ you've heard, not even the dreaded Bontempi or that crappy Casio you got for your sixth birthday. It makes sounds that recall scary movies and old sixties and seventies incomprehensible science fiction movies shown late on Channel 4, or episodes of Quatermass or something. Very, well, wibbly.
Oh wait I'm wrong there. Watching the video I see the ondonist, Cynthia Millar was only playing a specific piece, and that the keyboard can in fact reproduce normal instrument sounds. Interestingly, and I've never seen this before, it's the left hand, as she says, that is the heart of the machine, as without its use absolutely nothing works on the keyboard, as you'll see if you watch it. She demonstrates that by leaving the left untouched and playing with the right, there is no sound at all. So it's a sort of control box on the left with a wooden pedal that regulates the volume and the pitch of the instrument. She also mentions - quite important I would think - that the ondes Martenot cannot mimic any other instrument, and is usually expected to act as a backup to the orchestra, so therefore, while a precursor to them, it couldn't really be considered any real kind of synthesiser in itself.

The actual operation of the instrument is, I feel, a little hard to explain, especially when I'm neither a (real) musician or an engineer, so watching the video is the best thing if you want to learn about it, but basically it seems to use a sort of ribbon strip on the keyboard in conjunction with that keyboard and the left-hand electronic control. And speakers figure into it somewhere as well. Maurice Martenot took it on tour in 1930, so it was certainly known at this stage. I doubt it made the biggest splash though, being mostly as I said, according to Ms. Millar, an instrument that stays in the background. Its lack of popularity may also have been due to the inventor's disinterest in mass-producing the instrument; he only made them to order, and they were and are known to be extremely delicate and easy to damage, which further discouraged people from buying one.

Not surprisingly, given the time frame, they have been used mostly in the classical music genre, though again  given the weird sounds they make the ondes Martenot also features in such science fiction movies as Dr. Who and the Daleks (1964) and Mars Attacks! (1996), and you'll also here it in the classic Laurence of Arabia (1962). More contemporary uses include its use on Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, Tom Waits's The Black Rider and Blur's Damon Albarn's Monkey: Journey to the West.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Lev_Termen_playing_-_cropped.jpg)
Leon Theremin (1896 - 1993)

Nothing even close to an actual keyboard on the next effort, invented by a brilliant Russian physicist who was also responsible for the first proper television apparatus his home country had ever seen, and was technically one of the first real Russian spies, creating a listening device called "The Thing" in 1945, which was used to spy on American embassies as it was hidden inside a plaque given as a gift. Theremin certainly had an interesting life, being sent to the gulag in 1938, where it seems he worked with other top inventors and engineers, among them Andrei Tupolev, who would become one of the Soviet Union's most successful aircraft designers, and fighting in both the First World War and the Russian Civil War. He also shocked polite Russian society by marrying outside his race, when he took a black woman as his wife.

Although he was released from the gulag in 1947 he voluntarily continued working for the KGB, and in 1967 he was banned from playing his theremin at the Moscow Conservatory of Music when the director put into words the Soviet Union's attitude towards electronic music: "electricity is not good for music; electricity is to be used for electrocution". Lovely. His theremins were thrown out of the place. Theremins? Oh yeah. Those.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Etherwave_Theremin_Kit.jpg/500px-Etherwave_Theremin_Kit.jpg)
There it is. One of them anyway. Odd little thing. No keyboard, no keys. Chances are you may have seen one of these at some point. The idea is to manipulate sound waves by using your hand in a sort of waving, plucking motion, I guess similar to a harpist. Just, you know, without the harp. Interestingly, like many great inventions the theremin (which I suppose can't really be called a great invention as it was never that popular, but still) came about  by accident, when Theremin realised that while adapting the dielectric motion detector he called the "radio watchman" to produce an audio tone, the pitch changed when his hand moved about.

Once he had invented and perfect the theremin, he moved to America where he licensed it to RCA, who marketed it as the Thereminovox, and, with stunning either bad luck or lack of foresight, released it just as the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 hit. Unsurprisingly, nobody wanted to buy one, or could afford one, or were too busy jumping out of windows to their deaths to buy... well, you get the idea. It wasn't a good time for frivolous purchases. Or any purchases. When men walked around with signs saying "Will work for food", nobody was thinking about cool new gadgets to buy. It would in fact be the father of the modern synthesiser, Robert Moog, who we'll meet later, who would reinvigorate public interest in the theremin, an interest which would lead to his own invention of the world's first analogue synthesiser.
(Very interesting for us progheads, here's someone playing Floyd's "The Great Gig in the Sky" on one).

You could say the theremin is almost worked by magic, if you knew nothing about electronics. There is no human contact with the machine. Two antennae control volume and pitch, and the player stands at a distance from the instrument and waves his or her hands against either, controlling the flow. It's a bit technical and I'm not the one to explain it properly but if you want to look it up you can do so  here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin#Popular_music).

Most famously used on the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" (actually a similar instrument called an electro-theremin) the instrument was also employed by Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, The Rolling Stones' Brian Jones and heavy metal band Tesla, as well as in science fiction movies such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing from Another World and Ed Wood. Oddly enough, and despite popular belief, it was not used on Forbidden Planet, nor in Doctor Who.

Quote from: Trollheart on May 01, 2025, 08:56 PMYeah I would have to agree. Prog bands were doing really weird things with electronic music in the 1960s too.

Are early prog bands really electronic music?  I'm 100% OK if that's what you believe. For me, electronic music is defined by BPM and the start of synth pop.

I will never disrespect what The Who did on Who's Next.  "Baba O'Rley" is awesome.

I'd have to say electronic music has little if anything to do with BPM. Would you call Vangelis or Air or Carbon Based Life Forms or Solar Fields electronic music? None of them rely on beats per minute. I think perhaps you're failing to make a distinction between electronic music and electronic dance music?

Quote from: Trollheart on May 01, 2025, 09:19 PMI'd have to say electronic music has little if anything to do with BPM. Would you call Vangelis or Air or Carbon Based Life Forms or Solar Fields electronic music? None of them rely on beats per minute. I think perhaps you're failing to make a distinction between electronic music and electronic dance music?

While I don't disagree that 'electronic music' has little to do with BPM, on the other side of the coin, to @Buckeye Randy's point, could we really say, for example, that the Doors were making electronic music with Strange Days because they utilized a moog synthesizer? What constitutes 'electronic music'? Is it nothing more than using electronic instruments?

Before we lay claim to when electronic music started, we'd first have to agree collectively to a definition of electronic music, no? (wink, wink, nudge, nudge (https://scd.community/index.php?topic=1272.0)) :laughing:

i think that EDM is certainly important in the story of electronic music but that's just one application of the technology among many many other forms.  I've heard it said that electroacoustic/musique concrete was the first real scene of electronic music, sometimes defined just by using tape experiments.  Definition wise, I guess that's true, but wouldn't playing an amplified guitar also be considered electronic because of the pickups?

and by this metric, was Buddy Holly EDM?

Was Buddy Holly EDM? If by that you mean Extremely Dead, Mate, then yes.  :laughing:

Oh, let's defer to a higher power and see what the folks over at Somethinapedia have to say about it.

QuoteElectronic music broadly is a group of music genres that employ electronic musical instruments, circuitry-based music technology and software, or general-purpose electronics (such as personal computers) in its creation. It includes both music made using electronic and electromechanical means (electroacoustic music). Pure electronic instruments depend entirely on circuitry-based sound generation, for instance using devices such as an electronic oscillator, theremin, or synthesizer: no acoustic waves need to be previously generated by mechanical means and then converted into electrical signals. On the other hand, electromechanical instruments have mechanical parts such as strings or hammers that generate the sound waves, together with electric elements including magnetic pickups, power amplifiers and loudspeakers that convert the acoustic waves into electrical signals, process them and convert them back into sound waves. Such electromechanical devices include the telharmonium, Hammond organ, electric piano and electric guitar.[3][4]

The first electronic musical devices were developed at the end of the 19th century. During the 1920s and 1930s, some electronic instruments were introduced and the first compositions featuring them were written. By the 1940s, magnetic audio tape allowed musicians to tape sounds and then modify them by changing the tape speed or direction, leading to the development of electroacoustic tape music in the 1940s in Egypt and France. Musique concrète, created in Paris in 1948, was based on editing together recorded fragments of natural and industrial sounds. Music produced solely from electronic generators was first produced in Germany in 1953 by Karlheinz Stockhausen. Electronic music was also created in Japan and the United States beginning in the 1950s and algorithmic composition with computers was first demonstrated in the same decade.

So that's their broad definition. As for history...

QuoteElektronische Musik, Germany

Karlheinz Stockhausen in the Electronic Music Studio of WDR, Cologne, in 1991
Karlheinz Stockhausen worked briefly in Schaeffer's studio in 1952, and afterward for many years at the WDR Cologne's Studio for Electronic Music.

1954 saw the advent of what would now be considered authentic electric plus acoustic compositions—acoustic instrumentation augmented/accompanied by recordings of manipulated or electronically generated sound. Three major works were premiered that year: Varèse's Déserts, for chamber ensemble and tape sounds, and two works by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky: Rhapsodic Variations for the Louisville Symphony and A Poem in Cycles and Bells, both for orchestra and tape. Because he had been working at Schaeffer's studio, the tape part for Varèse's work contains much more concrete sounds than electronic. "A group made up of wind instruments, percussion and piano alternate with the mutated sounds of factory noises and ship sirens and motors, coming from two loudspeakers."[41]

At the German premiere of Déserts in Hamburg, which was conducted by Bruno Maderna, the tape controls were operated by Karlheinz Stockhausen.[41] The title Déserts suggested to Varèse not only "all physical deserts (of sand, sea, snow, of outer space, of empty streets), but also the deserts in the mind of man; not only those stripped aspects of nature that suggest bareness, aloofness, timelessness, but also that remote inner space no telescope can reach, where man is alone, a world of mystery and essential loneliness."[42]

In Cologne, what would become the most famous electronic music studio in the world, was officially opened at the radio studios of the NWDR in 1953, though it had been in the planning stages as early as 1950 and early compositions were made and broadcast in 1951.[43] The brainchild of Werner Meyer-Eppler, Robert Beyer, and Herbert Eimert (who became its first director), the studio was soon joined by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig. In his 1949 thesis Elektronische Klangerzeugung: Elektronische Musik und Synthetische Sprache, Meyer-Eppler conceived the idea to synthesize music entirely from electronically produced signals; in this way, elektronische Musik was sharply differentiated from French musique concrète, which used sounds recorded from acoustical sources.[44][45]

In 1953, Stockhausen composed his Studie I, followed in 1954 by Elektronische Studie II—the first electronic piece to be published as a score. In 1955, more experimental and electronic studios began to appear. Notable were the creation of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio at the NHK in Tokyo founded by Toshiro Mayuzumi, and the Philips studio at Eindhoven, the Netherlands, which moved to the University of Utrecht as the Institute of Sonology in 1960.

"With Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel in residence, [Cologne] became a year-round hive of charismatic avant-gardism."[46] on two occasions combining electronically generated sounds with relatively conventional orchestras—in Mixtur (1964) and Hymnen, dritte Region mit Orchester (1967).[47] Stockhausen stated that his listeners had told him his electronic music gave them an experience of "outer space", sensations of flying, or being in a "fantastic dream world".[48]

United States
In the United States, electronic music was being created as early as 1939, when John Cage published Imaginary Landscape, No. 1, using two variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano, and cymbal, but no electronic means of production. Cage composed five more "Imaginary Landscapes" between 1942 and 1952 (one withdrawn), mostly for percussion ensemble, though No. 4 is for twelve radios and No. 5, written in 1952, uses 42 recordings and is to be realized as a magnetic tape. According to Otto Luening, Cage also performed Williams Mix at Donaueschingen in 1954, using eight loudspeakers, three years after his alleged collaboration.[clarification needed] Williams Mix was a success at the Donaueschingen Festival, where it made a "strong impression".[49]

The Music for Magnetic Tape Project was formed by members of the New York School (John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, David Tudor, and Morton Feldman),[50] and lasted three years until 1954. Cage wrote of this collaboration: "In this social darkness, therefore, the work of Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff continues to present a brilliant light, for the reason that at the several points of notation, performance, and audition, action is provocative."[51]

Cage completed Williams Mix in 1953 while working with the Music for Magnetic Tape Project.[52] The group had no permanent facility, and had to rely on borrowed time in commercial sound studios, including the studio of Bebe and Louis Barron.

None of which really answers the question. Although I know your real question, which is, if I love Wikipedia so much why don't I marry it? My answer: how do you know I haven't?
:shycouch:

i would marry wikipedia

If you love Webster so much, why don't you Merriam

Else Marie Pade - Syv Cirkler

Dr Who theme - Ron Grainer / Delia Derbyshire

I'm just not satisfied with using the definition of electronic music from Wikipedia and simply calling it a day - in fact I take great umbrage at the idea! After all, my teachers always told me that you can't rely on Wikipedia. They wouldn't accept it as a cited source on papers, so why should I accept it here?

I propose that we debate and nitpick each other's definitions for a while to get closer to a semblance of truth and shared reality.

(https://y.yarn.co/2118d94e-293f-496a-84c4-5d348085f20f_text.gif)

electronic music is defined by music made when atoms and molecules energy is transferred while in contact, creating electricity that makes things happen and then the music does every sound is electronic music

Quote from: tristan_geoff on May 02, 2025, 04:15 AMi would marry wikipedia

It will have to get a divorce from me first, and I won't make it easy!

Quote from: SGR on May 02, 2025, 03:45 PMI'm just not satisfied with using the definition of electronic music from Wikipedia and simply calling it a day - in fact I take great umbrage at the idea! After all, my teachers always told me that you can't rely on Wikipedia. They wouldn't accept it as a cited source on papers, so why should I accept it here?

I propose that we debate and nitpick each other's definitions for a while to get closer to a semblance of truth and shared reality.

(https://y.yarn.co/2118d94e-293f-496a-84c4-5d348085f20f_text.gif)

What exactly are you going to do with umbrage? Can't you just borrow it instead of taking it? Seems a little greedy. Others need umbrage too, you know. I bet you also take offence, and then how am I going to keep the cows in?

How the SGRinch Took Umbrage

Although the thread title asks "When...?", I think an equally relevant question is "How...?"
Genres like jazz, rock and folk were born in taverns, clubs, bars where people wanted to be entertained. You could do it a capela, invest in a penny-whistle or, for those with cash to splash, buy a guitar. The birth of electronic music was so totally different, as TH makes clear:-

Quote from: Trollheart on May 01, 2025, 09:06 PMYou might, or might not, be surprised to find that the history of the synthesiser - or at least, the electric organ - goes back to the last years of the nineteenth century, when inventor Thaddeus Cahill (1867 - 1934) built what is widely regarded as the world's first electronic instrument, which he called the telharmonium, or the dynamophone. It was not quite what you would call portable, weighing in at approximately seven tons for the "lite" model, going all the way up to 200 tons for the top of the range, nor was it easily affordable to probably anyone other than the president of the United States, with a price tag of $200,000, which was massive money for then, about $5.5 million today. Yeah. Not the kind of thing you asked Santa to bring you for Christmas!
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Teleharmonium1897.jpg)

So, not to belittle all those early pioneers that have been mentioned, my interest in electronic music is from the moment when it left the academic/classical/novelty stuff behind, came of age and started competing, in terms of entertainment and availability, with other genres. That's when it took wing, and I give the prize for identifying that moment to Meatwad:-
 

Quote from: Meatwad on May 02, 2025, 04:45 AMDr Who theme - Ron Grainer / Delia Derbyshire

To my surprise, it turns out to be seven years later that Kraftwerk began their career: here's a live extract from their self-titled debut album:-


And shout out to Wendy Carlos, who spent several years playing classical music on a Moog synthesizer before catching up with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Dr. Who Theme) and creating her own self-penned electronic hit in 1971:-


1971 was also the year that the Zero Time album came out:-


Anyway, that's how I personally remember the development of electronic music, with T Dream, Bo Hanson and Jean Michel Jarre coming along a little later.