Tune in, turn on - Brief Article

Electronics Times, June 26, 2000

Chris Edwards plugs in his headphones and profiles 10 pioneers of electronic music

Right from the start of the century, music and electronics have been feeding off each other. As often as not, electronics has had to catch up with the musicians. In 1902, Thaddeus Cahill had the idea of piping music down telephone lines to hotels in New York. Unfortunately, the valve amplifier had yet to be invented and to create his Telharmonium, he was forced to build a 200-ton monster to generate a signal that was powerful enough to carry.

The design used notched rotors to generate different frequencies. Some 32 years later, Laurens Hammond, with the benefit of electronic amplifiers, used the same principle to build the first Hammond organ.

At other times, electronic equipment has been party to an accident in the studio that led to a new type of music. House would never have taken off without the fortuitous discovery of a then little-known bass synthesiser.

We take a look at the pioneers who could not compose without electricity.

Edgard Varese

Edgard Varese had to wait a long time before technology could catch up with his ideas. His musical education was in the early years of the 20th century when industrial sounds were thought to be the way to go. Even composers like Serge Prokoviev could not resist producing symphonies that tried to emulate machines. Varese wanted to go one stage further by incorporating real industrial noises.

He had to wait until the 1950s, when he could finally get access to a tape recorder, to compose Deserts, using his idea of `musique concrete', in which sounds are assembled on tape and played as a collage.

By the time he got his Ampex tape recorder as a gift, Varese had been beaten to the first musique concrete work by several years. But he is still seen as the composer who introduced the idea of sampling real sounds and playing them back in music.

Many years later musicians such as Brian Eno, countless electronica and hip-hop artists would do the same thing, starting off with reel-to-reel tape recorders before moving to digital samplers.

Jimi Hendrix

In between setting fire to and smashing up his guitars, Jimi Hendrix was partial to playing them through a variety of effects boxes, kicking off a fashion that is adhered to by almost all would-be rock guitarists today. Which of them would be without their fuzz box or distortion pedal?

Hendrix did the most to turn the guitar from a thing that went jingle- jangle into something that could make just about any sort of noise, given the right encouragement. In common with The Beatles during the late 1960s, Hendrix found that the recording studio was the place to experiment with sound.

You can still buy fuzz boxes with the same sort of germanium transistors found in Hendrix's original. He also liked to use more exotic stomp boxes, including octave doublers, a vibrato unit and the wah-wah, which was used on Voodoo Chile and other recordings made after 1967. The wah-wah is basically a filter with a pedal on top and no funk guitarist would be seen without one in the 1970s or, indeed, today.

Wendy Carlos

In the late 1960s, Wendy (originally Walter) Carlos put the music synthesiser on the map by recording Switched-on Bach, versions of Bach fugues and inventions rendered completely using synths. By working as a recording engineer after graduating from college, Carlos met and became friends with Bob Moog, who invented the eponymous synthesiser. Moog's synth was used throughout the album.

Carlos went on to use the vocoder, a type of parametric filter that uses the frequencies in the voice to shape another audio signal, in the score for Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange. Not long after, various cod sci-fi series and funk bands - as well as Kraftwerk - were using the vocoder wherever they could.

Carlos wrote scores for The Shining and Disney's Tron, which combined synths with a real orchestra. In between using synths to recreate the unusual tunings of Bach's day, Carlos took time out to develop a soundtrack restoration and conversion process for surroundsound with new-age composer Larry Fast.

Kraftwerk

Electronic and classical music are extremely well connected. Ralf Huetter and Florian Schneider were classical musicians studying at the Dusseldorf Conservatory until they decided to start the band Kraftwerk. They started out with electronic doodlings not dissimilar to those of compatriots Tangerine Dream. Then they discovered pop and the charts discovered Autobahn.

By the time Kraftwerk, now a foursome armed with home-made percussion instruments and a battery of synths, made Trans-Europe Express and The Man Machine, their pop reputation was sealed. In the 1980s, the German band would become the inspiration for a host of hip-hop and electro musicians, including Afrika Bambataa who purloined Trans-Europe Express for his Planet Rock.

By the time Kraftwerk released Electric Cafe, they realised that the group had pretty much had its day. Techno was getting underway in Detroit, having evolved from electro, and Huetter and Schneider turned to cycling, popping up occasionally for the odd live performance.