Electronic music was the 3rd stage of the aesthetics of music (said by H.H. Stuckenschmidt) – 1. Vocals 2. Instruments 3. Electronic Music ...The production of sounds started to become further away from the body.

7 traits of electronic music:
1. sounds sources of electronic music are unlimited, you can sample, and also sine waves… composer can invent sounds that do not nautrally exist in nature, or radically alter sounds that are natural to crate new instruments

2. Electronic music can expand the perception of tonality, and relinquishes music from the western traditional rules. All sounds carry equal importance

3. Electronic music exists in a state of actualization. Stravinsky talks about potential music and actual music, Score vs the execution of a performance. Elec. Music usually defies scoring because it can be composed live. The other issue is there isn’t a formal way to score a piece of electronic music. Scores can be used for future performances, by either graphic or western notations.

4. el emus has a special relationship with the temporal nature of music. The plastic (flexible, elastic, compress) nature of elec mus allows a compoers to record all values associated with sound, Pitch timbre, and an evelope can be recorded taking b=place over time The ability to modify a sound by time and pitch is one of the most fun

5. Electronic music itself becomes a material of the composition. The type of composition allows users to delve into the physics of sound.

6. Electronic music does not breathe, it is not affected by the limitations of human performance. Complex rhythm and speed are not an issue.

7. Electronic music often lacks a point of comparison with the natural world. This provides a largely mental and imaginative experience. Electronic music is disassociation with the natural. Listening requires intellect and imagination to interpret what is heard, and provokes the listener to derive meaning from the re-interpretation of unnatural sounds.

Tape composition methods and techniques:

Most modern recording practice and techniques are rooted in the classic tape studio and are still very similar. Shaeffer, Henry, Cage, and Varese: this type of composition liberated them from scoring and notating parts, which is super time consuming. Tape embodies both space and time. You can see the physical space the sound requires to be produce and unfold. This resonates with our perception of time as humans. Technology levels all characteristics of the physics of sound, because you can speed up and slow down a sound on tape. Chords become rhythms, and rhythms become drones. Duration, pitch and color are now all interchangeable.
Since all rooms have a resonant characteristic, the room will highlight the particular frequencies, and the formants of the room are emphasized.

Exam 2 was this week… And I chose 3 questions to answer on John Cage, The Mellotron, and Musique Concrete. I studied for this exam by reading the chapter, and making notes of the key people and points. As I came across person, I would write down the year they were born, and a few key things that they did in their lifetime. After reading over the notes I took, I got together with Taylor and we quizzed each other on the facts,, asking the questions we thought might be on the test. I felt pretty prepared for this exam, and my study techniques really helped me understand and remember the material.

The Chamberlin vs. The Mellotron!

Originating in Berlin, these were the first keyboards to replicate the sounds of other instruments. The premature models started with the idea of the early organs, with a foot keyboard as well. Any sound could be reproduced and played. David Nixon was one of the guys that helped Harry Chamberlin, an organist and electronics enthusiast, develop the keyboard instrument known as the Chamberlin. Harry is the father of all modern sampling. Harry started by tape recording big band instruments holding out different notes for 8 seconds, and this is how he started developing the sounds that would go into the keyboard. Loops lasted for 8 seconds because that is quite a long time for a player to actually play a note on a brass instrument with only one breath. Harry knew that it was already easy enough to make loop playbacks, and wanted to figure out how these loops could have attacks. If they were just loops with no attacks, it would be extremely difficult to tell where you were in the loop or song. Being only a loop with no attack, the loop wouldn’t restart when a key was re-depressed. He achieved this by playing a single piece of tape that had a starting and ending point, and began applying the loops to drum machines early on. The Chamberlin was to be seen as a home entertainment device, and placed in salons as well. Some models of the Chamberlin were released in 1948, ’51, ’59, ’60, ’61, and ’62. A man named Bill Franson offered his services as a salesman for Harry and the Chamberlins. Being unethical, he stole 2 of them. He took them back to England and solicited the Chamberlin as his own creation, even replacing the emblem that said “Chamberlin” to “Franson”. Bradmatic was the company responded to Franson’s advertisement in the newspaper, and they didn’t ask for prints from the development of the instrument. Instead they were focused on capitalizing on it. They presented the Mellotron as a rich man’s toy to add appeal to the instrument for a sales kick. Harry didn’t hear from Franson for a year, and the people who ran the Mellotron corporation were shocked to find out (while attending the NAMM show and seeing the Chamberlin) that the originators of the so-called “Franson” were someone other than Bill Franson. They made a compromise with Harry. They would sell Mellotrons in Europe, while Harry would sell in America, and he would get a percentage of all of the sales. The Mellotron though had crappy action when it came to the attack of the key. The Chamberlin was much smoother on the initial attack. A convenient thing about the Mellotron is that it has replaceable sound cartridges, where you could buy a string, horn, piano, or many other instrument sound cartridges. The Chamberlin unfortunately had fixed cartridges, so users were stuck with the original sounds whether they liked them or not. People would want to find out where these sounds come from when they saw a performance live. They wanted to know what actual instruments were being used in the Mellotron. How the Mellotron works – when you press down on a key, there is a cartridge inside with a tape loop on it that would play over a playhead when the key was depressed. Sounds were credited as “Mellotron” sounds rather than the actual type of instrument that was sounding because that was the emblem seen on stage by the audience. Mellotron built their own custom monitoring systems, and the Chamberlins used an old radio preamp. The Chamberlin used a mechanical lever, while the Mellotron used push buttons to change tones and timbre. Mike Pinder, a tester for the Mellotron, and a member of The Moody Blues ended up using the Mellotron in the band. Pinder saw the Mellotron as a filler inbetween vocal lines. Rod Argent from The Zombies got hold of a Mellotron, that the Beatles had actually left onstage, and began using it in their band! That’s way awesome. Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick used the Mellotron to write orchestral arrangements, because he and pretty much no one wanted to shell out the money for an entire orchestra when all the parts could be recorded, and loaded onto a cartridge that would then be placed inside the Mellotron. In 1963, ’64, ’68, and ’75 various Mellotron models were released. The double keyboard model was the popular one in the 1960’s, and was actually one of the models that Franson had taken to England.
Brian Kehew, Don Lawson, Fabio Frizzi, Mattias Olsson, David Kean, and Geoff Unwinn are some other composers/producers that used the Mellotron. Al Kooper believes there are 2 reasons to buy a synth - to replicate the sounds of real instruments, and to play sounds that people can invent on. Patrick Moraz used the Mellotron like a sampler, and wasn’t concerned about pitch. He sampled his own loops in a sequence of half steps that determined the order. It is said the Mellotron has a more mid-FI characteristic than the Chamberlin, and artists claim it gives a creepier sound to the instrument. Prices were around three or four hundred dollars, and later in the 1990s you had to pay thousands for a Mellotron that may very well be in bad condition. Michael Penn (Sean Penn’s brother), believes that the Chamberlin is significant to how people make records today because much of the sampling originated from this instrument, and Harry Chamberlin himself. The instrument didn’t receive very much wide spread use, and it is similar to the Theremin in that it was partly created for recreating pieces written for orchestra. There is not much reliability in the mellotron. Motors would drone until the instrument warmed up. It was a tempermental instrument. It would go out of tune if too much power was already being used up and there wasn’t enough to feed it. The biggest problem seemed to be how the Mellotron was handled in transit and weather. On tour, it sits in a truck over night, condensation would build up on the tapes and there would be water on tapes for the next gig. They’d plug in the Mellotron and tapes were dysfuncional. The entrepreneurs really narrowed down the market because few people were interested in such a complicated home entertainment device. This is ironic because Harry made a great product but it didn’t do well in the market. Harry’s business never expanded because after it being around for 15-ish years, the business still remained in a small warehouse that still looked like a startup company. He should have looked to investors, and other people to update sounds regularly. The Musicians Union saw that since its invention, anyone could use the Mellotron regardless of their musical skill (or lack there of), in which this started to cause issues because it started to put string players out of work. It did not make a profit and didn’t sell enough, and supply was much greater than demand. Eventually they changed the name to Novatron. David Biro, in 1974, invented Birotron because he didn’t like the sound of the Mellotron, and also didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars for an unreliable instrument with sounds that he didn’t think sounded very good. He looked for an easier, smaller, cheaper way to create it. Only 17 Birotrons were made. David Kean was looking to buy out Mellotron, and needed the master tapes from the Chamberlin for the original sounds, and ended up getting them through Les who took part in running the Mellotron company. New synths were becoming polyphonic and that put the Mellotrons out of work because they were only monophonic. Tony banks replaced his use of the Mellotron with vocodors and other synths, because the Mellotron limited the fact that he had to play a whole set. The Mellotron weighed 450 pounds, was inconvenient for tour, and people eventually began to stop using Mellotrons because they were becoming the generic sound and everyone was using them. M-audio released the M-tron plug-in that includes the classic sounds of the Mellotron. Markus Retsch provided sounds for the modern day Nord keyboards made by Clavia. The Chamberlin and the Mellotron introduced and preceded the many synthesizer keyboards and sequencers we have available to us today. It’s pretty amazing to think that the very keyboard I have at my home, an M-audio Keystation Pro 88 MIDI controller with faders on it, back then could have been seen as a futuristic keyboard.

In January 1966, 10 artists and 30 engineers embarked on a technological journey to accommodate dance acts with a synchronized lighting show, using photoelectric cells and the interruptions of light beams to create electric signals and musical noises.
John Cage created one of the most innovative electronic music performances – Variations VII. He and his engineers were using new and innovative techniques to create sound. Miking electronic appliances with contact mics and the use of sine wave generators were incorporated to create the piece and perform it live at the same time. John drew a big part of his inspiration from chants. These artists went to the extreme with the manipulation of sounds, almost to the point of noise. The process is very technical, and an art form in itself. Most people would perceive theses sounds as noise. He never limited himself to accept to the rules of composing music in the traditional manner. Variations VII didn’t use any magnetic tape. All sounds were in the air or produced by oscillators. As sounds were being heard in the performance, that was also the very live creation of that sound. It is really interesting to think about. Sounds were produced as they were heard, ending up as a form of chance music. John Cage derived his ideas from the I Ching book, by tossing sticks and coins to determine where sounds would be placed. Billy Kluber was someone who was experimenting in the research division trying to get computers to communicate with each other, and also helped perform Variations VII. He assisted in the building of the special platform in front of the control room where they set up tables with household appliances and other equipment. The juicers, blenders, radios, and fans used contact mics. They manipulated the sounds by using photoelectric cells. When a person would walk past a light and interrupt the light flow to the cell, the sound would change. These lights were place under the tables where all of the equipment was. The telephones that they acquired from BELL labs were wired lines with magnetic pickups that were connected to pick up sounds from real places in real time. Telephones were placed in a restaurant, a sanitation department, an apiary, and a few other places and the signal was sent to the building where the performance was. John Cage began encouraging the audience members to come stand close and watch the performance. David Tudor was another engineer/performer that had is own separate table with a series of gadgets that made oscillator sounds that were out of control.
The space they used for 9 evenings had a 6 second reverb echo, which provided an environment that made these electronic sounds smoother, given that the decay was so long. Moog designed antennaes that would interact with dancers using photoelectric cells.
Terry Riley was a composer, and he was interested in turtles and had an aquarium. They used the phone to record the motor that circulated the water in the tank. They also recorded sounds from a newspaper print plant. John Cage was the intellectual idea behind the composition and performance. He composed variables, and a basic outline of the piece. As a composer, he set his engineers up as composers because their movement would affect the photocells, and control sounds. Performers could also be seen as instruments. They made things so interesting, and were going above and beyond, using everyday sources were reframed, and warped into new sounds. This performance challenges our notion of what an instrument, a song, and a composer is. Cage’s role in relinquishing control: He was very open minded and left it up to the gear and the performer to add the special elements to the performance. He set up an environment and a setting, and used chance to create a live composition. A big part of this piece was the acceptance of sounds from the world. How was this performance beyond just a music performance? It was multimedia presentation of sound. There were audience members watching the performance.

Pierre Schaeffer’s 4 delimitations:
1. Living animals voices sounds
2. Noises
3. Modified or prepared instruments
4. Conventional instruments

He used all 4 categories in non-traditional manners.

Schaeffer adopted 7 values:
1. Mass - organization of the sound in a spectral dimension.
2. Dynamics - measurable values of various components of the sound
3. Tone quality/Timbre - refers to tone
4. Melodic profile - temporal evolution of the total spectum of sound.
5. Profile of mass - spectral components of the sound mass low range to high rand and high range to low range
6. Grain - analysis of the irregularities of the surface of the sound
7. Pace - analysis of the amplitude dynamics of the sounds (how loud, how soft)

3 plans –
1. Harmonic Plan (material within the entire spectrum)
2. Dynamic Plan (affected the envelope ADSR)
3. Melodic Plan (pitch and tone, over time).

French vs. German
The French had a more organic approach to composition of electronic music.
The German approach was greatly influence by Serialism and 12-tone music – The German inventor Albert Schoenberg (1874-1951) and marked the beginning of serialism.

12-tone music (using the chromatic scale avoids a strong sense of melody, resolution, and cadences.

Tone rows – 5 general rules
1. 12 notes are organized in a different order or row
2. Each tone is given equal importance.
3. Row can be inverted or reversed, retrograde, forwards and backwards or combinations of directions
4. No repeats until all tones in a row are used
5. Can be manipulated to follow a ‘random’ pattern

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) was a German composer, and he was one of the most important and controversial composers of the 20th century. He is most well known for composing electronic music, tape loop music, aleatory music (controlled chance music), and musical spatialization. He started out by cutting and pasting music together in Schaeffer’s studio in 1952. The piece was called ETUDE.

The very nature of a piece of tape can be represented in time, and time makes the most sense to us as humans.
Duration can be controlled and manipulated in regards to a piece of tape by cutting, slicing or looping. He took the approach of serialized composition and applied mathematical analysis of tones to the generation, shape, editing of the tape-recorded sounds. To do this he used tone generators and tape.

Sine waves started to be manipulated on a tape. Serialism was used in tape creation to dynamics, attack, duration, and timbre. 1.92kHz is the average center frequency of the human voice. Stockhausen calculated what harmonics/overtones would be below and above and combined the pitches, defining the early form of additive synthesis.

“Studie II” in 1952 the first composition through sine waves. As the composition became a score, the piece had to follow a graphic representation, because the music would not appear to make any sense notated on a staff. The graphic representation, or score, consisted of a series of blocks to represent different tones, and lines drawn to represent the various manipulations of the sound envelopes, which include ADSR – the attack, decay, sustain, and release of a sound. Scoring this type of piece in this way takes the abstractness out of the music, as people are then able to follow along visually to this music that many people would view initially perceive as noise, not music.

Stockhausen’s process in the 1950’s consisted of 4 things.
1. Unified time structure
2. Splitting the sound
3. Multi-layering spatial composition
4. Equality of tone and noise

The organization of sound in this way liberated tones and music from the western traditional rules, and provided equality for music.
He is a big influence on the Beatles and Paul McCartney, for the Sergeant Pepper’s and White albums.