Electronic Rock - Technology

Technology

Experiments in tape manipulation or musique concrète, early computer music and early sampling and sound manipulation technologies paved the way for both manipulating and creating new sounds through technology. The world's first computer to play music was CSIRAC in 1950-1, designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard and programmed by mathematician Geoff Hill. Early electronic instruments included the theremin, which uses two metal antennas that sense the position of a player's hands and control oscillators for frequency with one hand, and amplitude (volume) to produce an eerie but difficult to manipulate sound. It was used by avant garde and classical musicians in the early twentieth century and was used on a large number of 1940s and 50s science fiction films and suspense.

Electronic musical synthesizers that could be used practically in a recording studio became available in the mid-1960s, around the same time as rock music began to emerge as a distinct musical genre. The Mellotron, an electro-mechanical, polyphonic sample-playback keyboard, which used a bank of parallel linear magnetic audio tape strips to produce a variety of sounds enjoyed popularity from the mid-1960s. The initial popularity of the Mellotron would be overtaken by the Moog synthesizer, created by Robert Moog in 1964, which produced completely electronically generated sounds which could be manipulated by pitch and frequency, allowing the "bending" of notes and considerable variety and musical virtuosity to be expressed. The early commercial Moog synthesiser was large and difficult to manipulate, but in 1970 Moog responded to its use in rock and pop music by releasing the portable Mini-moog, which was much simpler, easier to use, and proved more practical for live performance. Early synthesisers were monophonic (only able to play one note at a time), but polyphonic versions began to be produced from the mid-1970s, among the first being the Prophet-5.

MIDI, (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) was created in 1982, as an industry-standard protocol that enables electronic musical instruments (synthesizers, drum machines), computers and other electronic equipment (MIDI controllers, sound cards, samplers) to communicate and synchronize with each other. Unlike previous analog devices, MIDI does not transmit an audio signal, but sends an event messages about pitch and intensity, control signals for parameters such as volume, vibrato and panning, cues, and clock signals to set the tempo, allowing the building of more complex music and the integration of different devices.

In the new millennium, as computer technology become more accessible and music software has advanced, interacting with music production technology is now possible using means that bear no relationship to traditional musical performance practices: for instance, laptop performance (laptronica) and live coding. In the last decade a number of software-based virtual studio environments have emerged, with products such as Propellerhead's Reason, Ableton Live and Native Instruments Reaktor finding widespread appeal. Such tools provide viable and cost-effective alternatives to typical hardware-based production studios, and thanks to advances in microprocessor technology, it is now possible to create high quality music using little more than a single laptop computer. Such advances have been seen as democratizing music creation, leading to a massive increase in the amount of home-produced electronic music available to the general public via the internet.