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What Does The Future Hold For The Composition and Performance of
What Does The Future Hold For The Composition and Performance of
electronic music?
In the musical community artists, composers and listeners alike are always on the search
for new inspirations. These inspirations fuel the livelihood of those involved with music;
be it new listening material, ideas to help flourish a music idea or even a feeling the artist
wishes to portray. Ten years ago, even someone deeply interested in electronic music
could not predict or comprehend genres such as “Glitch”, “Dub-step” and “Minimal
Techno” which have evolved to become some of today's most popular and influential
electronic music sounds. These three genres are only a handful of the full spectrum
electronic music has flourished to. If we look at the roots of this kind of music, the first
instances of people being able to electronically manipulate sounds go as far back as the
first discovery of how to record sound in 1878 with Thomas Edison’s Phonograph1. This
provided the initial form of media which could be manipulated in order to create different
sounds. The first possibility for real time electronic alteration of sounds came about with
system2. This allowed for electronic amplification and alteration of sounds. If we look at
the time line of these discoveries and compare them to the advancements of today’s
electronic music age we can certainly see that boundaries are being advanced on a
1
Scientific American (1896) The Phonograph, 1877 thru 1896 http://www.machine-history.com/The
%20Phonograph.%201877%20thru%201896 [Accessed 28/11/10]
2
Mix Online (2006) 1906 Lee De Forest Triode Vacuum Tube http://mixonline.com/TECnology-Hall-
of-Fame/leedeforest-triode-vacuum-090106/ [Accessed 28/11/10]
tremendously fast scale. We can also take from this that scientific ingenuity and its
applications to music have become integrated strongly with the electronic music genre.
This has always created an edge of sophistication and intrigue and leads to a cast of
followers to the genre that revel in the air that surrounds it. Due to this and electronic
finesse on the part of the artist. Composers must have experience of theory and how
sounds fit together unless they compose with an ensemble or are able to play the
instruments they write for. A performer must have a degree of skill to play their
instrument and read a score. It is safe to say that electronic music is a genre that has taken
an unconventional path away from the tradition ways due to advancements in sound
synthesis and algorithmic composition, both styles where the composer/artist is able to
create sounds or play from a bank of real-instrument synthesized sounds. The timbre of
these sounds can be changed in real-time without the need or knowledge of how to
physically alter the instrument too. This allows for a new “breed” of “electronic artists”
that are able to produce music without any pre-requisite musical background, merely on
they impression of what sounds good or not. The origins of this method of music
composition go back as far as 1948 with the birth of “music concrete” where composers
used recorded natural sounds and altered them to make a kind of ambient music3. This
type of electronic music is perhaps one which has evolved in retrospect. Originally it
consisted of taking ambient environment sounds and transposing them into a piece of
3
FAU (Unknown) Musique Concrete: History and Figures
http://www.fau.edu/~hieronym/EMMusiqueConcrete.htm [Accessed 28/11/10]
music. Now recent advancements with speaker calibrations and environments allow the
composer to transpose their music back into an environment. This allows soundscapes to
of this can be seen at institutes such as the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast where a
room with speakers on all 4 walls, ceiling and floor of the room, combined with an
“acoustically transparent, modular grid floor”4 allows for the listener to be suspended in a
“pool of sound” which can come from all directions, above, below and from all sides.
The acoustic properties of the room can also be adjusted allowing for the environment to
alter the sound furthermore. Perhaps this is new future for electronic music to be
composed? Instead of having 5.1 surround systems to represent sound from all directions,
maybe this will be replaced by 3D.1? Allowing listeners to have these soundscapes in
their own living rooms or even compose for these environments. This would allow for a
spatial aspect to be added to music. There is also a branch of speaker arrays named
“ambisonics”. This and “sound field synthesis” allow for sounds to occur with a sense of
time varying location in a sound field set up by arrays of speakers. Although highly
expensive and complicated to set up, this allows for a listen to be placed in a listening
environment where sounds can be heard to “move” around the listener, in a life like
manner. In the extreme future of this aspect of electronic composition, perhaps stereo
images will become obsolete. It is obvious to see that most electronic music is associated
with a dance environment, most all clubs adopt a electronic music atmosphere which also
helps reinforce its image; loud bass, strobe lighting and laser displays all help associate
individuals dancing with movement and sound. Perhaps in the future if these three
4
SARC (Current) The sonic laboratory http://www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/main.php?page=soniclab [Accessed
28/11/10]
dimensional or even active listening environments will give the listeners a sense of
freedom in their movement, no longer needed to face a front stage in a club, similar to the
If a performer was to have an instrument which could recreate almost every instrument
sound available and offer real time adjustments of the timbre and possibility for digital
sound effects, then surely this renders all other instruments obsolete in terms of
playability. The only loss would be the sense of prestige for that performer by fans of the
played? Is there really the need for physical constrictions on sounding it? Fretting strings
takes time and precision, moving key distances and knowing the correct key to play in is
also time consuming. Perhaps this new instrument could be controlled similar to a
computer to “auto-tune”, the performer would always be in the correct key and only have
to have a sense of timing. Many artists already incorporate such techniques into their
performances. Artists such as “Little Boots” with her “laser harp”, a harp which has no
strings but is triggered by breaks in the laser signals transmitted and received where the
strings would usually be attached, or Matt Bellamy’s from “Muse” “Kaoss Pad”, a device
on his guitar that allows him to control the pitch an timbre of guitar sounds via a
interactive pad he can slide his finger on, incorporate similar devices. These devices help
keep electronic music ingenuous as well allowing the performers to feed motion and
dance back into the audience through the music the performance, physically and visually,
much like a “soundscape” listening environment. This corresponds to a lot of modern day
DJ equipment, it consists mainly of knobs and sliders that are used to alter the sound,
creating a much more hands on approach to creating sound. If an audience finds what a
performing is doing interesting to watch, then it draws them more into the music.
I feel that as advancements in electronic music are made, there may be alienation
own instruments in an ensemble. In a sense, electronic music may turn into its own
independent genre. As the performance techniques such as the ones I mentioned earlier
advance, it is possible for electronic music to incorporate “nostalgic” sounds into band
performances or vice versa, bands are now able to integrate with a DJ in a performance,
appealing to a larger range of listeners. It is almost at the point now where artists can
create whatever sound they wish and incorporate this into a song. Perhaps the only
restrictions left for the composer are the tools in which he can record these sounds, so the
future for electronic music may hold advancements in the capturing of sound with
different interfaces. With the increased ease of creating and producing music, it has led to
a lot faster based music community; this is further bolstered by integration of music with
social networking sites, the internet and portable listening devices. More artists and
composers being able to present their music to a larger medium will without doubt lead to
an increase amount of genres and sub genres and the listening base to support further
development of these. With devices developed by Apple, such as the iPod touch and
iPad, it is even possible for listeners to search for a song, listen to it and even perform
alterations or their own mixes and upload this at any location, anytime. Because of this,
maybe restrictions are being held by the formatting of such sounds. Mp3 files allow for
encoding of the song name and artist details as well as information about the tempo and
key of songs but in a environment which is so fast paced, perhaps more should be done to
file encoding to allow it to be easier distributed and edited amongst the larger scores of
people who wish to remix or use parts of artists work in their own recordings.
Downloading sites such as “Beatport” allow for the download of files in .wav format for
in increased price compared to mp3. As well as offering higher sound quality, it also
allows for the files to be edited easier with production software. The next step perhaps
would be for artists to release their files in the format of the individual tracks before they
were mixed to a single track. This would allow for individuals to incorporate a drum beat
they liked or maybe a guitar riff that appealed to them far easier. A final consideration is
that since electronic music nowadays requires a significant level of music technology to
create and perform, many musical cultures may still be to adopt their influences to
electronic music. In Africa the 2010 African Music Awards don't even have a category
for electronic music. The largest contributors to the electronic music scene still remain
the US and Europe, especially Germany and its neighboring countries. Once the entire
world has made the technological advancement to be able to participate in this era of
electronic music, there may be even more color added to the spectrum.
certainly holds a wide range of foreseeable advancements. The fast paced music
community that surrounds it and its vast projection onto the public certain will result in
the creation of more genres of music. Adoption of the advancement in technology will
certainly hold for interesting changes in the environments in which music is performed
and how it is able to be done so by the performers. Ideas will no longer be held in
boundaries set by a score and a composer’s imagination but through other tools allowing
a composer to set his ideas down more efficiently, perhaps even the birth of another
musical notation. This age of electronic music is certainly giving the power to the
performer and allowing them to create music in real time and express it in an exciting and
dynamic way whilst synchronizing this with the environments they wish to perform it in,
Flavorwire Unsound Festival Artists Predict the Future of Electronic Music 2010
http://flavorwire.com/67601/unsound-festival-artists-predict-the-future-of-electronic-
music [Accessed 29/11/10]