Electronic Music: Systems, techniques, and controls

Electronic Music: Systems, techniques, and controls by Strange, Allen. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780697036124.

In the early 1960s the development of integrated electronic music systems and voltage-controlled modules began a new era of electronic music. The relative ease of the newer techniques involved, along with the publicity which accompanied the commercial aspiration of the manufacturers of electronic music systems, brought about a sudden audience/composer appeal to electronic music. What are the processes the “electronic composer” follows to make a composition? What are the parameters involved in the production of electronic music? What are the available techniques and how do they work? “Conventional music” composers have a number of devices such as homophony, polyphony, inversion, retrograde, dodecophonic systems, tonality, aleatory processes, etc, that they may or may not use in the creation of their art form. In the same way, electronic music composers utilize various techniques and methods, sometimes in combination with “conventional” techniques and sometimes completely apart from those aspects of structuring sound. This book will describe and explain these electronic music techniques for the composer/musician/listener who is not familiar with them, and will discuss, in laymen’s terms, the techniques available to the electronic music composer of this decade. (from the Preface)