1 - The origins of electronic music

Summary

Classical visions

We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.

Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (1626)

The origins of electronic music lie in the creative imagination. The technologies that are used to make electronic music are a realisation of the human urge to originate, record and manipulate sound. Although the term electronic music refers specifically to music made using electronic devices and, by extension, to certain mechanical devices powered by electricity, the musical possibilities that these technologies have opened up are a recurring theme in literature, art, engineering and philosophy. But it was not until the turn of the twentieth century, when electronic and electromechanical instruments started to become a physical reality, that certain forward looking musicians began to turn to the new possibilities already imagined by others.

Francis Bacon's celebrated description of a modern sound studio is one of many examples of such a creative imagination. The New Atlantis, written in 1624 and published in 1626, was a utopian tale of mariners in the southeastern seas who were shipwrecked upon an island containing a model civilisation, in which science and spirituality found union. The ‘sound-houses’ passage is one of a series of descriptions, given by the island's governor, of its various knowledge resources and houses of learning.