The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

https://www.openculture.com/2025/06/the-history-of-electronic-music-in-476-tracks.html

by bookofjoe • 1 year ago

125 44 1 year ago

openculture.com

jschveibinz• 1 year ago

Raymond Scott was left off of the list: https://youtu.be/s87cYlMInwE?feature=shared

rzzzt• 1 year ago

My addition would be Jean Jacques Perrey: https://youtu.be/P8AKP4Tw9sE

gizajob2• 1 year ago

An even simpler addition would be “Strawberry Fields Forever”.

https://youtu.be/44GB53rnI3c?si=v7Uw3By6LwkE7w-F

gizajob2• 1 year ago

A list more notable for its glaring omissions than what it includes.

hecanjog• 1 year ago

my college is a kind of a kind of a center of the most tradicional, western avant-gard electronic music, so certainly I agree that it leaves a lot of outside

Let's list some of the outside.

Maryanne Amacher, Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue, Clarence Barlow, Bebe and Louis Barron... I'm brain-farting so many, keep going!

helpfulContrib• 1 year ago

Bebe

Awesome shout-out.

Missing: Cabaret Voltaire, Art of Noise, Yes ..

derbOac• 1 year ago

Delia Derbyshire

Laurie Spiegel

It's a bit fuzzy in where the boundaries are for the category represented by the list.

tsimionescu• 1 year ago

Isao Tomita, Alan Parsons, Vangelis, Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman probably deserved a mention as well.

aspenmayer2• 1 year ago

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

https://music.ishkur.com/

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44470331

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37919241

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083516

aspenmayer2• 1 year ago

Related:
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26212706 - Feb 2021 (9 comments)
Iskhur's Guide to Electronic Music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083516 - Nov 2020 (1 comment)
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744571 - Aug 2019 (71 comments)

via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37920641 h/t dang

amiga386• 1 year ago

I'd not heard of UbuWeb before, but it sounds likr an interesting project for curating a cross-media avant-garde art collection (although it has now finished?)

"Electronic Music" is a bit of a misnomer. I think most people would think of Electronic Music as genres like rave, acid, techno, house, trance, jungle, drum and bass, dubstep, and so on. For that, you want Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music (https://music.ishkur.com/) and its branching history for how all these genres influenced and evolved from eaxh other

But this collection is just the avant-garde parts - the roots of Ishkur's tree. It's the musique concrete and theremins and radiophonic workshop type music. Those early genres only get a brief look in Ishkur, but here they are in detail.

TheOtherHobbes• 1 year ago

This is what electronic music was before it became commercialised and mainstream as "music with synthesizers."

Most of it is pre-synth, with early experiments with tape, and sometimes analog synthesis and computer DSP.

It's ended up in a strange space culturally - lurking in modern music's attic like an ageing mad uncle whom everyone agrees was a genius, but hardly anyone still listens to. (Outside of academia, which is its own world.)

mycall3• 1 year ago

It still exists under the moniker 'new music' and even has shows happening (e.g. https://www.bayimproviser.com/calendar.aspx)

fipar• 1 year ago

As late as in 2000 it was still common to refer to electronic music to what this article uses the term for, and what you refer to as “dance music” instead.

See this great compilation (with a lovely booklet that’s more of a mini book) for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm:_The_Early_Gurus_of_Electr...

I got lots of late-night listening pleasure out of that one, except for the first theremin track; I just found that one unbearable…

SanjayMehta• 1 year ago

I have this set, bought it in a museum near Legoland San Diego.

They had a great collection of early synths. Can’t remember the name.

eimrine• 1 year ago

This collection was an opener in my interest to really old electronic sound, it is called musique concrete. There are some of it on torrents, Pauline Oliveros and others are common guests in my playlist now.

mycall3• 1 year ago

There are tons more to discover on archive.org

https://archive.org/search?query=musique+concrete

MarkusWandel• 1 year ago

A bit snobbish isn't it? No computer singing "Daisy Daisy". No Doctor Who theme. No Wendy Carlos. No Jean Michel Jarre, just to name a few.

AlecSchueler• 1 year ago

Is it? Why do you feel that excluding those particular pieces and people make the list snobbish?

marchingkazoo• 1 year ago

I don't mean to speak for the parent poster. But FTA: "Spanning the years 1937–2001, the collection should especially appeal to those with an avant-garde or musicological bent." The tracks cited by the parent are not avant-garde nor musicological, but popular. I think the point is valid and all but admitted.

ethan_smith• 1 year ago

Delia Derbyshire's groundbreaking work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop deserves special mention here - her realization of the Doctor Who theme and pieces like "Blue Veils and Golden Sands" represent a crucial bridge between academic electroacoustic experimentation and more accessible electronic music.

joshcsimmons2• 1 year ago

All listed are excellent consumers of the techniques pioneered by the people on OPs list. It's not that the artists/examples you listed are bad, they're just not remotely on the same level as someone like Karlheinz Stockhausen. If you don't understand how the two groups are different you underscore your own point.

Towaway69• 1 year ago

Been listening to it for the last four hours - definitely good for focussing.

mk_stjames• 1 year ago

This is a bit incorrectly titled, as the source denotes that the tracks are "Electroacoustic" music, not general "Electronic".

The collection is clearly aimed at presenting music where electronic triggers and some synthesis is used in concert with acoustic instruments or spaces, and is super biased towards "Musique concrète", and concert-hall, classical compositions for what I can hear, ala Luc Ferrari.

You're not going to see an appearance of Kraftwerk, Suzanne Ciani, Wendy Carlos, or Model 500.

This is less a "history", and more an "eclectic subgenre list by date".

MichaelRo• 1 year ago

Yes, very disappointing. I thought it'll be something similar to this YouTube video "Evolution of Electronic Music (1929 - 2019)", which btw I like very much but it's severely lacking due to being only =~ 20 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqukyEC3qWM

I don't know how accurate the YouTube list is but I never heard of anything prior to Jean Michelle Jarre's Oxygene (about 6 minutes in the list). If It were to compare the list with geological history, before 1976 it's weird Ediacaran biota. And afterwards, suddenly, it's like the Cambrian explosion :)

o0-0o2• 1 year ago

If there is no Juan Atkins on this list, it's surely mis-titled.

inatreecrown2• 1 year ago

"Take it with a grain of salt, or perhaps use it as a provocation to curate a more intelligent, inclusive, and comprehensive selection."

mock-possum• 1 year ago

How can there be a timeline of electronic music with no Kraftwerk.

Edit - wow no Raymond Scott or Tomita either?

joshcsimmons2• 1 year ago

It would have been virtually impossible for pop bands like Kraftwerk to produce their music if not for the massive corpus of tools and practices developed by innovators on the ubuweb list.

I am actually bummed to see ubuweb referenced on HN. Musical taste is a very emotional topic for those that haven't made a formal study of it. Publicizing this to an audience of armchair music historians who think this tame list is "eclectic" likely won't take the time to understand that it is the bedrock of research that created pop electronic music.

mycall3• 1 year ago

Raymond Scott and Desmond Leslie were missing from their collection but worth seeking out.

daneel_w• 1 year ago

The list is missing a handful of true pioneers in electro-acoustic and electronic music. I'm not thinking about composers of popular synthesizer music, which don't really fit this specific list, but people like Henk Badings, Tom Dissevelt, Jean-Jacques Perrey, Kid Baltan and Morton Subotnick.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 1 year ago

This is second openculture list I've seen on HN recently, and when I visit the link, I may be dumb but I cannot see a list, playlist or anything corresponding the actual title of the post.

perching_aix• 1 year ago

Then what is it that you do see? Because I see references to specific releases like this, with an audio embed following them right after:

Hear below Stockhausen’s “Kontact,” Henry’s “Astrologie,” and Bayle’s spare “Theatre d’Ombres” further down.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 1 year ago

There are 3 embedded audio widgets, with a total playing time of about 55 mins.

That seems unlikely to contain 476 tracks ... and nowhere do I see any actual list of tracks (other than the mention of 3 that you quoted).

PaulDavisThe1st3• 1 year ago

Aha, the actual list is here: https://ubu.com/sound/electronic.html

o0-0o2• 1 year ago

No Plastikman? Sigh

louthy• 1 year ago

If you ignore Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Wendy Carlos, Kraftwerk, or any of the genre defining moments/movements (like Brian Eno, The Normal, Laurie Anderson, The Belleville Three, Frankie Knuckles, LTJ Bukem, Aphex Twin, …) then the list is at best incomplete.

aimeric2• 1 year ago

Sadly, no mention of Louis and Bebe Barron, who together created the first all-electronic soundtrack for the 1956 movie "Forbidden Planet".

This was before the invention of the synthesizer a few years later: Louis created so-called "cybernetic circuits", which apparently had a life-cycle similar to living organisms, while Bebe arranged the resulting sounds into music.

And, to this day, no one knows exactly how they created their music... (Almost no one, that is - it's my PhD topic ;-)

quakeguy2• 1 year ago

Now we need to know more!

aimeric2• 1 year ago

A substantial mythology has formed around the soundtrack's creation. One of the prevailing notions is that the sounds were generated by torturing and electrically overloading the "cybernetic circuits". There's evidence that this is simply artistic misdirection.

In reality, the music was carefully crafted and performed - with an emphasis on performance, rather than random events and sounds. (The genre of "Krell music" went off at a completely wrong tangent in this regard...)

It's unfortunate that Bebe Barron downplayed her own compositional technique and creative input in order to bolster this mythology.

The research is focused on the nature of the Barrons' cybernetic circuits. Using digital equivalents of these circuits, the aim is to recreate the title track, using only the techniques that were available to the Barrons in the 1950s.

GuB-42• 1 year ago

Is it even "music" at that point? It has nothing that I associate with music: rhythm, melody, scale, etc... I don't mean these are unpleasant or uninteresting, but we are stretching the definition of music a bit here.

For example you won't call a recording of a a busy café, a thunderstorm, a jungle or a conversation "music". Foley and sound effect artists are not making music either.

These tracks felt to me more like a movie, but without the image, dialogue, and score, leaving only the ambiance sounds and effects.

moritzwarhier• 1 year ago

Yes, that's the point of musique concrete and why this page that recycles the original list gives really bad context and the renaming is inappropriate, IMO.

There is plenty of electronic music from before 2001 but this list is extremely focused on a handful of composers of academic electroacoustic recordings.

While it has plenty of interesting entries, I think that linking site with the renaming is really bad at giving context, even where they try:

Also, there’s clearly much more to electronic music than either celebrity DJs or obscure avant-garde composers. Many hundreds of popular electronic composers and musicians—like Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Bruce Haack, or Clara Rockmore—fall somewhere in-between the worlds of pop/dance/performance and serious composition, and their contributions deserve representation alongside more experimental or classical artists.

Even where they try to give context, the cambrian explosion of what most people now consider electronic music from the 70s, but mostly 80s and 90s is completely ignored, and that's not just techno and dance music.

The original name "electroacoustic" seems much better, but even then, I don't feel this to be a very meaningful curation with e.g. all the Stockhausen recordings just dumped in with each of their parts counted as one "track" each (this terminology clearly alludes to the electronic music more usually listened to).

To be honest, find this type of music interesting, but calling the blog post misnamed is almost too charitable, given it links the other list, changes the title and even hints at how limited its perspective is.

In the 20th century, there were musicologists who insisted on the difference between "E-Musik" (Ernste Musik, "serious music") and "U-Musik (Unterhaltungsmusik, "Entertainment music").

The problem was that this distinction was indeed meant to be snobby and completely ignored how interesting new music, including experimental music, was created before and then came to real fruition in the 20th century.

Stockhausen et al are interesting, but this seems like a "selection of 476 pieces of E-Musik / electroacoustic music / musique concrete" more than a "history of electronic music".

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-_und_U-Musik

This distinction apparently only existed in Germany, so no English Wilipedia article.

Most of the "music" made by these people originates in publicly funded institutions and academia. Fine, but it's really the "black square on black canvas" type art academia in a way.

It is interesting and was certainly influential, but there is a level of unfounded snobbery to many of these artists and their listeners when it comes to other electronic music.

The main critique is repetition (obviously, in all dance-adjacent genres), and lack of radical departure from harmonics and rhythm. Also regarding electronic music that is not only dance-oriented.

There seems to be very little overlap of people who even know less commercial -more experimental- "regular" electronic music and come from this electroacoustic movement.

Although there are some artists who cite this movement and musique concrete as inspirations, especially Noise and Ambient artists.

It's like making a "history of 20th-century" music that is half twelve-tone music and half experimental organ music with no Western scale or harmonics, all by obscure academic artists.

Still interesting, but also kind of... meh. Limited.

The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

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