A radio studio equipped with magnetic tape became the birthplace of Music Concrète, which made all the sounds there are its material. Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry created the pieces of music stitched together, cutted & glued from railway station noise „dockside clanging, street shouts, creaking doors, sighs, cries and whisper“.[1] Out of the Philips Research Laboratories came the first ‘popular electronic music‘, produced by Henk Badings, Tom Dissevelt and Dick Raaijmakers, all ’serious’ composers as well. Those early recordings bear a striking resemblance to some veins of contemporary electronic music (mathew herbert comes to mind) although their making was so much mor­e cumbersome.

From the beginning electronic music attracted technicians and/or technically minded musicians, and sometimes their works where not less moulded by the wish to check out the technical possibilities than by musical criteria. They profoundly changed what it means to ‘be a musician’ or ‘make music’ - the image of the ‘music nerd’ working alone on his sound with his synthesizer/sequenzer/computer at night has its very first roots in these early days. In between there lie decades of development of recording technology and electronic instruments, the emergence of the modern recording studio, and with it the role of the modern ‘producer’ as the one to mediate between musicians and technology, the one ­responsible for the ’sound’.

The importance of ’sound’ for popular music is still going hand in hand with the development of new musical instruments, today mostly in the form of computer programs - specifically designed to produce new sounds or rather to give the artist/producer the possibility to create those new sounds themselves. Where the promise of recording technology was to catch every sound and render it manipulatable, the promise of electronic music instruments has been to be able to generate every possible sound. Both tendencies converge in the modern studio, and made ’sound’ an important musical category of its own, comparable to ‘melody’, ‘rhythm’ etc. But it differs from these traditional categories in the immediacy in which it is perceived. To a large extent, sound ‘works’ without context.

It’s like the body of a note, its presence, not really denotet by any sign, and hardly summable by one. Not only electrically generated bass is immediately perceived through the body (and not just the ears), chirping and buzzing, clapping and crashing don’t need much context to be ‘understood’, at least on a low level. At the same time is the production of ’sound’ a much less bodily endeavour than the production of music has ever been before. A conventional musicians knowledge borders on the instinctive; years of practice have given him a ‘feel’ for his instrument; he feels what he has to do in order to get this or that sound, and he immediately hears if he has succeed or not. Electronic music production, in most cases, is just about the opposite.

The understanding of sound as a wave that can be mathematically described, that is manipulated through changing some parameters, often represented by numbers, and the graphical representation of sound, which seems to be the ‘thing’ that is manipulated, are of an altogether different quality. It’s not just the change in the way of working - doing something, listening, doing again, listening again -, a mode that is becoming less important already as computer performances continue to rise and real time manipulation of music becomes a more realistic option. It is the objectivation of ’sound’ the way melody, harmony and rhythm have been objectified by notation. Sound itself, the most elusive aspect of music, has become tangible as an artifact, an artifact that can be ‘touched’, looked at, turned this or that way, be compressed or drawn longer, even mirrored/reflected, as has been the case with melody for a long time.

Exemplary and anachronistic at the same time seems to be the activity of the DJ, playing prerecorded sound and at the same time being dependent on his ears to controll the manipulation his hands are doing. Those immediate manipulations, hands on the records themselves, give back some of the qualities of ‘live’ to the music being played. But maybe I should write ‘gave’, because this manual djing, this dependence on the ears is itself vanishing as music analysis and manipulation technology become more advanced. The media that made music into a ‘thing’, those physical recordings, are vanishing, leaving music to the binary states of the digital realm, not a thing anymore, but a discrete mathematical description of analogue sound. Not a thing, but cut up in myriads of little ones and zeros.[2]

1. Rob Young, Pioneers – Roll Tape: Pioneer Spirits in Musique Conrète, in: Peter Shapiro (Hrsg.), Modulations – A History of Electronic Music: Throbbing Words on Sound, New York 2000, p.12
2. Michael Betancourt, The Aura of the Digital