electronic music

Electronic music broadly is a group of music genres that employ electronic musical instruments, circuitry-based music technology and software, or general-purpose electronics (such as personal computers) in its creation. It includes both music made using electronic and electromechanical means (electroacoustic music). Pure electronic instruments depend entirely on circuitry-based sound generation, for instance using devices such as an electronic oscillator, theremin, or synthesizer: no acoustic waves need to be previously generated by mechanical means and then converted into electrical signals. On the other hand, electromechanical instruments have mechanical parts such as strings or hammers that generate the sound waves, together with electric elements including magnetic pickups, power amplifiers and loudspeakers process the electric signals produced by the pickups and convert them back into sound waves. Such electromechanical devices include the telharmonium, Hammond organ, electric piano and electric guitar. The first electronic musical devices were developed at the end of the 19th century. During the 1920s and 1930s, some electronic instruments were introduced and the first compositions featuring them were written. By the 1940s, magnetic audio tape allowed musicians to tape sounds and then modify them by changing the tape speed or direction, leading to the development of electroacoustic tape music in the 1940s in Egypt and France.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Electronic music”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

electronic music is music that mainly employs electronic musical instruments, digital instruments and circuitry-based music technology, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 46 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶