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The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

• 42 Comments
• This is a bit incorrectly titled, as the source denotes that the tracks are "Electroacoustic" music, not general "Electronic".
  The collection is clearly aimed at presenting music where electronic triggers and some synthesis is used in concert with acoustic instruments or spaces, and is super biased towards "Musique concrète", and concert-hall, classical compositions for what I can hear, ala Luc Ferrari.
  You're not going to see an appearance of Kraftwerk, Suzanne Ciani, Wendy Carlos, or Model 500.
  This is less a "history", and more an "eclectic subgenre list by date".

  By mk_stjames 14 hours ago

• It would have been virtually impossible for pop bands like Kraftwerk to produce their music if not for the massive corpus of tools and practices developed by innovators on the ubuweb list.
  I am actually bummed to see ubuweb referenced on HN. Musical taste is a very emotional topic for those that haven't made a formal study of it. Publicizing this to an audience of armchair music historians who think this tame list is "eclectic" likely won't take the time to understand that it is the bedrock of research that created pop electronic music.

  By joshcsimmons an hour ago

• How can there be a timeline of electronic music with no Kraftwerk.
  Edit - wow no Raymond Scott or Tomita either?

  By mock-possum an hour ago

• "Take it with a grain of salt, or perhaps use it as a provocation to curate a more intelligent, inclusive, and comprehensive selection."

  By inatreecrown2 3 hours ago

• If there is no Juan Atkins on this list, it's surely mis-titled.

  By o0-0o 8 hours ago

• Yes, very disappointing. I thought it'll be something similar to this YouTube video "Evolution of Electronic Music (1929 - 2019)", which btw I like very much but it's severely lacking due to being only =~ 20 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqukyEC3qWM
  I don't know how accurate the YouTube list is but I never heard of anything prior to Jean Michelle Jarre's Oxygene (about 6 minutes in the list). If It were to compare the list with geological history, before 1976 it's weird Ediacaran biota. And afterwards, suddenly, it's like the Cambrian explosion :)

  By MichaelRo 11 hours ago

• [deleted]

  By 9 hours ago

• I'd not heard of UbuWeb before, but it sounds likr an interesting project for curating a cross-media avant-garde art collection (although it has now finished?)
  "Electronic Music" is a bit of a misnomer. I think most people would think of Electronic Music as genres like rave, acid, techno, house, trance, jungle, drum and bass, dubstep, and so on. For that, you want Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music (https://music.ishkur.com/) and its branching history for how all these genres influenced and evolved from eaxh other
  But this collection is just the avant-garde parts - the roots of Ishkur's tree. It's the musique concrete and theremins and radiophonic workshop type music. Those early genres only get a brief look in Ishkur, but here they are in detail.

  By amiga386 20 hours ago

• This is what electronic music was before it became commercialised and mainstream as "music with synthesizers."
  Most of it is pre-synth, with early experiments with tape, and sometimes analog synthesis and computer DSP.
  It's ended up in a strange space culturally - lurking in modern music's attic like an ageing mad uncle whom everyone agrees was a genius, but hardly anyone still listens to. (Outside of academia, which is its own world.)

  By TheOtherHobbes 17 hours ago

• It still exists under the moniker 'new music' and even has shows happening (e.g. https://www.bayimproviser.com/calendar.aspx)

  By mycall 12 hours ago

• As late as in 2000 it was still common to refer to electronic music to what this article uses the term for, and what you refer to as “dance music” instead.
  See this great compilation (with a lovely booklet that’s more of a mini book) for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm:_The_Early_Gurus_of_Electr...
  I got lots of late-night listening pleasure out of that one, except for the first theremin track; I just found that one unbearable…

  By fipar 14 hours ago

• I have this set, bought it in a museum near Legoland San Diego.
  They had a great collection of early synths. Can’t remember the name.

  By SanjayMehta 14 hours ago

• Sadly, no mention of Louis and Bebe Barron, who together created the first all-electronic soundtrack for the 1956 movie "Forbidden Planet".
  This was before the invention of the synthesizer a few years later: Louis created so-called "cybernetic circuits", which apparently had a life-cycle similar to living organisms, while Bebe arranged the resulting sounds into music.
  And, to this day, no one knows exactly how they created their music... (Almost no one, that is - it's my PhD topic ;-)

  By aimeric 7 hours ago

• Now we need to know more!

  By quakeguy 7 hours ago

• A substantial mythology has formed around the soundtrack's creation. One of the prevailing notions is that the sounds were generated by torturing and electrically overloading the "cybernetic circuits". There's evidence that this is simply artistic misdirection.
  In reality, the music was carefully crafted and performed - with an emphasis on performance, rather than random events and sounds. (The genre of "Krell music" went off at a completely wrong tangent in this regard...)
  It's unfortunate that Bebe Barron downplayed her own compositional technique and creative input in order to bolster this mythology.
  The research is focused on the nature of the Barrons' cybernetic circuits. Using digital equivalents of these circuits, the aim is to recreate the title track, using only the techniques that were available to the Barrons in the 1950s.

  By aimeric 5 hours ago

• A bit snobbish isn't it? No computer singing "Daisy Daisy". No Doctor Who theme. No Wendy Carlos. No Jean Michel Jarre, just to name a few.

  By MarkusWandel 16 hours ago

• Delia Derbyshire's groundbreaking work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop deserves special mention here - her realization of the Doctor Who theme and pieces like "Blue Veils and Golden Sands" represent a crucial bridge between academic electroacoustic experimentation and more accessible electronic music.

  By ethan_smith 13 hours ago

• All listed are excellent consumers of the techniques pioneered by the people on OPs list. It's not that the artists/examples you listed are bad, they're just not remotely on the same level as someone like Karlheinz Stockhausen. If you don't understand how the two groups are different you underscore your own point.

  By joshcsimmons an hour ago

• Is it? Why do you feel that excluding those particular pieces and people make the list snobbish?

  By AlecSchueler 16 hours ago

• I don't mean to speak for the parent poster. But FTA: "Spanning the years 1937–2001, the collection should especially appeal to those with an avant-garde or musicological bent." The tracks cited by the parent are not avant-garde nor musicological, but popular. I think the point is valid and all but admitted.

  By marchingkazoo 15 hours ago

• This collection was an opener in my interest to really old electronic sound, it is called musique concrete. There are some of it on torrents, Pauline Oliveros and others are common guests in my playlist now.

  By eimrine 18 hours ago

• There are tons more to discover on archive.org
  https://archive.org/search?query=musique+concrete

  By mycall 12 hours ago

• The list is missing a handful of true pioneers in electro-acoustic and electronic music. I'm not thinking about composers of popular synthesizer music, which don't really fit this specific list, but people like Henk Badings, Tom Dissevelt, Jean-Jacques Perrey, Kid Baltan and Morton Subotnick.

  By daneel_w 10 hours ago

• Is it even "music" at that point? It has nothing that I associate with music: rhythm, melody, scale, etc... I don't mean these are unpleasant or uninteresting, but we are stretching the definition of music a bit here.
  For example you won't call a recording of a a busy café, a thunderstorm, a jungle or a conversation "music". Foley and sound effect artists are not making music either.
  These tracks felt to me more like a movie, but without the image, dialogue, and score, leaving only the ambiance sounds and effects.

  By GuB-42 2 hours ago

• A list more notable for its glaring omissions than what it includes.

  By gizajob 21 hours ago

• > my college is a kind of a kind of a center of the most tradicional, western avant-gard electronic music, so certainly I agree that it leaves a lot of outside
  Let's list some of the outside.
  Maryanne Amacher, Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue, Clarence Barlow, Bebe and Louis Barron... I'm brain-farting so many, keep going!

  By hecanjog 21 hours ago

• Delia Derbyshire
  Laurie Spiegel
  It's a bit fuzzy in where the boundaries are for the category represented by the list.

  By derbOac 16 hours ago

• Actually, what's amazing is that many of the people being mentioned fit within any coherent statement of the boundaries. Schaeffer is on it but not Radigue? When it said, "There's few women," I didn't think they meant it leaves off Oliveros!

  By sramsay 16 hours ago

• Isao Tomita, Alan Parsons, Vangelis, Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman probably deserved a mention as well.

  By tsimionescu 12 hours ago

• >Bebe
  Awesome shout-out.
  Missing: Cabaret Voltaire, Art of Noise, Yes ..

  By helpfulContrib 17 hours ago

• If you ignore Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Wendy Carlos, Kraftwerk, or any of the genre defining moments/movements (like Brian Eno, The Normal, Laurie Anderson, The Belleville Three, Frankie Knuckles, LTJ Bukem, Aphex Twin, …) then the list is at best incomplete.

  By louthy 7 hours ago

• This is second openculture list I've seen on HN recently, and when I visit the link, I may be dumb but I cannot see a list, playlist or anything corresponding the actual title of the post.

  By PaulDavisThe1st 8 hours ago

• Then what is it that you do see? Because I see references to specific releases like this, with an audio embed following them right after:
  > Hear below Stockhausen’s “Kon­tact,” Henry’s “Astrolo­gie,” and Bayle’s spare “The­atre d’Ombres” fur­ther down.

  By perching_aix 8 hours ago

• Aha, the actual list is here: https://ubu.com/sound/electronic.html

  By PaulDavisThe1st 7 hours ago

• There are 3 embedded audio widgets, with a total playing time of about 55 mins.
  That seems unlikely to contain 476 tracks ... and nowhere do I see any actual list of tracks (other than the mention of 3 that you quoted).

  By PaulDavisThe1st 7 hours ago

• Related:
  Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music
  https://music.ishkur.com/
  Previously:
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44470331
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37919241
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083516

  By aspenmayer 21 hours ago

• Raymond Scott and Desmond Leslie were missing from their collection but worth seeking out.

  By mycall 12 hours ago

• Raymond Scott was left off of the list: https://youtu.be/s87cYlMInwE?feature=shared

  By jschveibinz 3 days ago

• My addition would be Jean Jacques Perrey: https://youtu.be/P8AKP4Tw9sE

  By rzzzt 16 hours ago

• An even simpler addition would be “Strawberry Fields Forever”.
  https://youtu.be/44GB53rnI3c?si=v7Uw3By6LwkE7w-F

  By gizajob 15 hours ago

• Been listening to it for the last four hours - definitely good for focussing.

  By Towaway69 14 hours ago

• No Plastikman? Sigh

  By o0-0o 7 hours ago