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

the invention of amplification by Lee De Forest's 1906 Audion triode amplification

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

music dependency on advances in technology to remain as musically diverse as it is there

will always be an interest in it as long as music technology advancements are made.

In traditional sense music performance/composition has always required a level of

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

be created and music to be given a three dimensional characteristic. Such advancements

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

“silent disco’s” that occur today.

Due to the advancements in synthesized sounds, it is possible to recreate most

instrument sounds to a degree where it is hard to determine which is real or synthesized.

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

specific instruments. So if we imagine this “all-on-one” instrument, how would it be

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

“Theremin” or “Ondes Martenot” In a way which is controlled by the domains of

electromagnetism or radio frequencies with no physical interaction. If controlled by 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

between it and “handmade” music consisting of dedicated musicians performing their

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.

As a conclusion, the future for electronic music composition and performance

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,

even live performances across continents to people in any location

Other Sources & References

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]

3 FAU (Unknown) Musique Concrete: History and Figures

http://www.fau.edu/~hieronym/EMMusiqueConcrete.htm [Accessed 28/11/10]

4 SARC (Current) The sonic laboratory http://www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/main.php?

page=soniclab [Accessed 28/11/10]
Boy in a Band Website The Future of Electronic Music 2010
http://www.boyinaband.com/2010/01/the-future-of-electronic-music/ [Accessed
29/11/10]

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]

Petrovic D. Electronic Music V2.0 http://analogik.com/article_electronic_music.asp

[Accessed 29/11/10]

Muujun Richie Hawtin On the Future of Electronic Music 2007

http://muujun.co.uk/index.php/2007/11/06/richie-hawtin-on-the-future-of-electronic-
music/ [Accessed 29/11/10]