Electronic music - Simple English Wikipedia

# Electronic music

### From Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading.

Electronic music is music which is made by electronic equipment such as tape recorders or computers.

After World War II, when the tape recorder had been invented and was becoming popular, composers started to use them to make music. The tape recorder was needed for the performance. Composers took lots of different sounds. Sometimes it was music played on ordinary (acoustic) instruments which was then changed in some way by the tape recorder. Sometimes they took sounds from everyday life such as the sound of water, traffic noise or bird song. All these noises were put together in the way the composer wanted by using the tape recorder. The results were often very interesting, but there were problems. Some people asked: “Is it music?” Other people got bored at looking at a tape recorder during a concert instead of being able to watch live musicians who were playing.

Composers in Paris were experimenting with electronic music in the 1940s. They called it “Musique concrète” because they used natural, concrete sounds (“concrete” in this sense meant the opposite of “abstract” music which was written down for performance). The sounds were played back at different speeds, combined in lots of ways, played backwards or played continuously (in a loop), or played into a mixer and re-recorded onto another tape recorder. The sounds could be filtered, or effects such as vibrato or echo could be added. Sometimes they used synthesizers which were machines that could make electronic music in real time. They sounded more like normal instruments than the sound effects on a tape recorder.

Composers who used these ways of making music include John Cage (1912-1992), Bruno Maderna (1920-1973) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (b.1928). Very often composers combined electronic music with ordinary instruments being played.

Computers have often been used for composing electronic music. 1-56159-174-2

## [edit] References

New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 1980; ISBN1-56150-174-2

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Category: Music

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