The development of modern electronic sound

The evolution of technology in the twentieth century had a huge impact on music. Music, as we know it today, would not exist without technology. In fact, a new music, called electronic music, evolved in the twentieth century parallel to this technological evolution. The emergence of electronic music in the 1950s was another example of the ability of musical culture to reinvent itself through new approaches to instrumentation, style, and structure. H. Stuckenschmidt characterized electronic music as the Third Stage in the aesthetic history of music, the first two being the invention of vocal music and instrumental music: “Music has developed further and further away from its human origins; now, at what we define as its Third Stage, the Electronic, we are astonished and not without pride, to have before us an art, totally controlled by the spirit of man, in a way not previously imaginable.”

The early period occurred from around 1900 through the early 1940s, and focuses on performing electronic musical instruments. There were disagreements over when electronic music actually began. Early practitioners of electronic music, regardless of their school of thought toward composing music, uniformly recognized several key aspects of electronic music that distinguished it from making music in a traditional way.