Editor Peter Kirn is the writer and publisher of the venerable Create Digital Music/Motion blogs. For most high-tech art geeks, these blogs are the center of the blogosphere. He is also a teacher who has taught at various universities, and runs electronic music workshops all over the country. He lends a well-traveled perspective to the book, and the two articles he wrote specifically for the book are insightful additions.

The book is made up of interviews interspersed with a couple long-form artist profiles and gear overviews. Most of the 21 included articles are around ten pages long. The book opens with a profile of Kraftwerk from 1982 and ends with an interview of Robert Henke, the co-developer of Ableton Live. The authors sampled include Kirn himself, as well as Greg Rule, Robert Doerschuk, Chris Gill and others. Surprisingly, the articles aren’t ordered strictly chronologically. Since the artists often talk in detail about how they use their gear, this can be jarring at times. While reading the book, I had to occasionally look back at the byline for an article in order to contextualize the artist references to software or hardware. This might be even more difficult for younger readers who can’t rely on their memory of technology from the nineties or earlier.

The interviews usually delve into the creative process for an artist or ensemble that played a role in the evolution of electronic dance music. It’s interesting to hear the often clashing views on creativity in dance music. Patrick Codenys of Front 242 argues that the key to creativity is to “always be aware of your environment.” Other artists, such as Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers, talk about starting tracks by just experimenting with a sample or a certain piece of gear. Although most of the artists employ mass-market equipment, in chapter 12, Richard James, aka Aphex Twin, talks about how all of his tracks begin with his own custom tools. Without a doubt, the book chronicles the way that electronic musicians fetishize their gear, but this is only natural. After all, the evolution of electronic dance music is, in a significant way, the evolution of electronic musical instruments.

Many of the articles touch on the controversy that surrounded the art of sampling in the 1990s. For those of us who were around to witness it, these articles hearken back to the era when sampling was making headlines through the legal system. Chapter eight is almost entirely devoted to artists weighing in on the moral and creative implications of sampling. In a revealing moment, Richard James seems truly exasperated by the whole discussion, claiming that he is “obsessed with using [his] own sounds” and he doesn’t “care if someone copies my whole track and puts it out under a different name.”

Peter Kirn’s own articles supply the highlights of the book. His interview with musicologist Denise Dalphond provides a readable introduction to the academic view of EDM. Her brief comments on sexism in electronic music will ring painfully true for many readers. The concluding interview with technologist and composer Robert Henke provides a strangely contrarian view on the entire book. He sagely points out that as the tools become more refined, they will become less interesting. In other words, electronic music will be mature when writers care more about the conception of a piece than about what gear was used to execute the artist’s plan.

The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music is a very readable introduction to an often-overlooked history. Because the collected articles were written for magazines, they are short and easy to consume. For academics and scholars, the book is a welcome change in style which may be useful for extra readings in a course on electronic music. Certainly the articles on Kraftwerk or rave culture are essays that educators can use to connect academic electroacoustic music to popular EDM. The book fits well with the other books in this category. Readings from this book can be used to augment readings from Christopher Cox’s Audio Culture or Paul Miller’s Sound Unbound.

On the whole, The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music is a valuable resource for educators, composers and hobbyists. It clearly illuminates the history of an overlooked niche of popular music. This history is very important to fans of electronic music, so it behooves educators and composers to gain an awareness of the artists involved. Furthermore, at the affordable price of $16.99, The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music should be on every musician’s bookshelf.

In 1957 … the first computer-generated sounds were heard at Bell Telephone Laboratories (or Bell Labs, as it was called) in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Max Mathews had joined the acoustic research department at Bell Labs to develop computer equipment to study telephones. With the aim of using listening tests to judge the quality of the sound, he had made a converter to put sound into a computer and a converter to get it back out again, which according to Mathews, “turned out to be a very successful way to do research in telephony.” Mathews went further:

“It was immediately apparent that once we could get sound out of a computer, we could write programs to play music on the computer. That interested me a great deal. The computer was an unlimited instrument, and every sound that could be heard could be made this way. And the other thing was that I liked music. I had played the violin for a long time …”

John Pierce, also at Bell Labs, lent crucial support to the music project. As he explains, “I was executive director of the communication sciences division when Max used the computer to produce musical sounds-I was fascinated.”

In 1957, Mathews finished Music I, his first sound generating computer program. The first music produced with Music I was a seventeen second composition by Newman Guttman, a linguist and acoustician at Bell Labs. The composition, called In the Silver Scale, used a scale slightly different from the diatonic scale so as to have better controlled chords. Mathews said, “It was terrible.” Pierce said, “To me, it sounded awful.” But, as Msthews continues, “It was the first.” In fact, the chords were never heard because Music I was a single-voiced program. As Mathews recalls, “The program was also terrible-it had only one voice, one waveform, a triangular wave, no attack, no decay, and the only expressive parameters you could control were pitch, loudness, and duration.”

Music I was the first in a series of sound-generating computer programs collectively referred to as the Music-N series. Music II followed in 1958, with improvements of four voices and arbitrary waveforms, and it introduced the concept of the wavetable oscillator. Music III, which followed in 1960, was, as Mathews puts it, “when things really came together.” Music III introduced the concept of modularity, or unit generators, so that one could put together “orchestras” of “instruments.” It introduced additional possibilities for shaping sounds and it introduced the concept of a “score,” where notes could be listed in the order of their starting times and each note was associated with a timbre, loudness, pitch and duration. [1]

The computer music research at Bell Labs and other institutions provided the backdrop to the first round of creative musical work with computers. From the beginning, John Pierce and Max Mathews had been eager to make contact with musicians, and in 1961 Pierce hired composer James Tenney to come and work at Bell Labs.

Tenney worked at Bell from 1961 to 1964 and completed several compositions during that period. His first was Analog #1: Noise Study, finished in 1961 and inspired by the random noise patterns he heard in the Holland Tunnel on his daily commute between Manhattan and New Jersey. His interest in randomness at that time included using the computer to make musical decisions as well as to generate sound. In Dialogue (1963), Tenney used various stochastic methods to determine the sequencing of sounds.

Tenney continued to develop his stochastic ideas in Phases (For Edgard Varese) (1963), in which different types of sounds are statistically combined. His techniques resulted in sounds with continually changing textures, similar to a fabric made up of a variety of materials in various shapes and colors.

In 1963, Mathews published an influential article on computer music titled “The Digital Computer as a Musical Instrument” in Science. Jean-Claude Risset, at the time a physics graduate student in France, read the article and became so excited by the potential of computer music that he decided to write his thesis based on research he planned to do at Bell Labs. Risset came to Bell in 1964, began research in timbre, returned to France in 1965, and came back to Bell in 1967. He completed Computer Suite from Little Boy in 1968 and Mutations in 1969. Both compositions contain sounds that could not have been produced by anything but a computer.

Meanwhile, at Stanford University in 1963, John Chowning also came across Max Mathews’s Science article and became inspired to study computer science. Chowning visited Bell Labs in the summer of 1964 and left with the punched cards for Music IV. He subsequently established, with David Poole, a laboratory for computer music at Stanford. The lab would eventually become the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), a major center for computer music research. Chowning later went on to develop frequency modulation (FM) as a method for generating sound. His approach to FM, in fact, was licensed by Yamaha in 1974 and was the basis of sound production in many Yamaha synthesizers through the 1980s.

Chowning’s early compositions Sabelithe (1971) and Turenas (1972) both simulated sounds moving in space. In Stria (1977), Chowning used the Golden Section to determine the spectra of the sounds. The results were otherworldly–magical, strange, icy, and unlike anything that one could imagine coming from an acoustic instrument. [2]

1. Chadabe, Joel. Electric Sound, 1997. 108.
2. Chadabe, Joel. “The Electronic Century Part III: Computers and Analog Synthesizers.” Electronic Musician, Vol. 16, Issue 4 (April 2000).

A performance by Palindrome at the 2008 SEAMUS (Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States) conference at the University of Utah. Robert Wechsler, dancer/choreographer, Dan Hosken, sound and interactive sound programming. The video from a camera focused on the dancer is analyzed in realtime by the program EyeCon and that motion data is passed to another computer where it is used to control sound using the program Max/MSP. [1]