Electroacoustic Music: 3 Characteristics of Electroacoustic

Electroacoustic music is a style of musical composition and performance in which electronic devices manipulate the acoustic sounds of musical instruments. This musical technique, which began in the 1940s and 1950s, applies effects like reverb, delay, harmonizing, tape manipulation, and sonic deconstruction.

Electroacoustic music starts with traditional instruments like piano, violin, acoustic guitar, percussion, and human voice. It then manipulates the timbre of those instruments so that the final audio tracks, which music artists play through amps and loudspeakers, sound distinct from the instruments that originally produced the music. Electronic music derives most of its sound from synthesizers, samplers, and drum machines.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, avant-garde composers began using acoustic instruments to build synthesized electronic sounds.

• Tape music and musique concrète: Early forms of electroacoustic music included the musique concrète movement, led by French composer Pierre Schaeffer, and later the German Karlheinz Stockhausen. Musique concrète sought to create music from natural sounds recorded onto a tape and then further manipulated. The Beatles would mimic this technique on their notorious "Revolution No. 9." Today, this technique is sometimes called “acousmatic music.”
• Elektronische musik: Another German composer, Herbert Eimert, created works known as elektronische musik that were an electronic corollary to the serialism of modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg. Elektronische musik could be played without human performers.
• Fusing two styles: By the late 1950s and early 1960s, numerous avant-garde composers began fusing elements of Schaeffer's musique concrète and Eimert's elektronische musik, setting the template for the majority of electroacoustic pieces to follow. Pioneering composers from the era include Edgard Varèse, Luciano Berio, Henri Pousseur, Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt, and John Cage. Early electroacoustic compositions appeared at the ONCE Festival of New Music, which ran in Ann Arbor, Michigan, between 1961 and 1966.
• Influence on classical music: Electronic instruments and electroacoustic music continue to play a role in contemporary classical music. In the mid-to-late twentieth century, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass created minimalist compositions with manipulated acoustic instruments and tape music. Electroacoustic music also appears in movie scores, such as Wendy Carlos's 1972 soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange.
• Music festivals: Today, the electroacoustic community supports its art form via the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) and art music festivals like Berlin Atonal in Germany and the Olympia Experimental Music Festival in Olympia, Washington. Electroacoustic musicians also maintain a presence at the International Computer Music Conference.

Three key characteristics distinguish electroacoustic music from acoustic music and from the electronic music played in dance clubs and at raves.

1. 1. Electroacoustic music starts with the electronic manipulation of acoustic sounds. Electroacoustic music typically begins with acoustic sounds such as the human voice, acoustic guitar, or orchestral instruments. These sounds then undergo varying degrees of manipulation until they sound notably different from the source. Sometimes electroacoustic artists combine the sounds in real-time with taped field recordings or other unorthodox sound sources.
2. 2. The final product plays through loudspeakers or amplifiers. After the composer or performer manipulates the music, they play the electroacoustic music through amps, PA speakers, and headphones.
3. 3. Electroacoustic instruments combine human performance and electronic manipulation. The electroacoustic movement has its set of instruments that harness twentieth- and twenty-first-century technology. Some of these instruments rely on human musicality. These include the theremin (where human performers control oscillation and amplitude to create precise musical pitches) as well as the Chamberlin and its mass-produced cousin the Mellotron (where performers trigger tape loops of recorded instruments using a piano-style keyboard).

Many twentieth and twenty-first-century musicians have built reputations exploring the synthesis of live electronic sounds with traditional acoustic instrumentation. Here are four notable examples:

1. 1. Karlheinz Stockhausen: The German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was a prolific pioneer of electroacoustic music. His 1960s output, which includes Kontakte (1958–60), Mixtur (1964), Mikrophonie I (1964), Mikrophonie II (1965), Telemusik (1966), and Hymnen (1966–67), provided a template for sound synthesis, musical expression, and performance practice in the world of electroacoustic music.
2. 2. Pierre Boulez: Boulez was a versatile composer and conductor who embraced all styles of twentieth-century classical music. Though he did not often compose electroacoustic music, his 1981 piece Répons highlights the style. It features soloists playing two pianos, harp, vibraphone, glockenspiel/xylophone, and cimbalom. A large chamber orchestra accompanies the soloists, plus various computer equipment designed to manipulate their resonating characteristics.
3. 3. Milton Babbitt: A composer, music theorist, and mathematician, American Milton Babbitt continually pushed twentieth-century classical music. Philomel (1964), commissioned for soprano Bethany Beardslee for a debut at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, features a solo soprano voice taped and manipulated with a synthesizer and broadcast through four loudspeakers set at different places in the performance hall.
4. 4. Steve Reich: Reich is considered a forerunner of American minimalist music, alongside Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young. Reich stands out from his fellow minimalists for his mastery of tape phasing. He plays multiple tape recordings of the same instrumental performance then manipulates the tape speed so that the recordings fall out of sync. The out-of-sync recordings form new melodies, which additional live instruments can then augment. Examples of Reich's tape music technique include It's Gonna Rain (1965), Piano Phase (1967), Violin Phase (1967), and Electric Counterpoint (1987).

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