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Description of  Live Wires: A History of Electronic Music

We live in an electronic world, saturated with electronic sounds. Yet, electronic sounds arent a new phenomenon they have long permeated our sonic landscape. What began as the otherworldly sounds of the film score for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet and the rarefied, new timbres of Stockhausens Kontakte a few years later, is now a common soundscape in technology, media, and an array of musical genres and subgenres. More people than ever before can produce and listen to electronic music, from isolated experimenters, classical and jazz musicians, to rock musicians, sound recordists, and the newer generations of electronic musicians making hip-hop, house, techno, and ambient music. Increasingly we are listening to electronic sounds, finding new meanings in them, experimenting with them, and rehearing them as listeners and makers. explores how five key electronic technologiesthe tape recorder, circuit, computer, microphone, and turntablerevolutionized musical thought. Featuring the work of major figures in electronic musicincluding everyone from Schaeffer, Varse, Xenakis, Babbitt, and Oliveros to Eno, Keith Emerson, Grandmaster Flash, Juan Atkins, and Holly Herndon is an arresting discussion of the powerful musical ideas that are being recycled, rethought, and remixed by the most interesting electronic composers and musicians today. Read more