The electric musical cultures are very diverse; they have in common but one thing: Electronic music. This style of music makes use of electronic technology to upgrade their musical instruments. However, there’s an important distinction to make between proper electronic music and music made with electric instruments. Many instruments use electricity to produce their sound, like for example the organ, the electric guitar and the telharmonium, but pure electronic music are those in which a mechanical instrument doesn’t intervene in the sound production anymore, because they’re replaced by the computer, the Theremin and the sound synthesizer.

History of the electric musical cultures: Towards a new musical aesthetic.

The first step towards the development of electronic music was the invention of the triode audion in 1907. Various musicians started to think of a futuristic microtonal music with new sound sources. They wanted to find another option to the classic music and the hallowed traditions, and they felt that the second stage of development for western music would be through electronic means. Another branch of the Futurist movement started to value “noise,” and to give expressive and artistic value to sounds that had never been thought of as musical. They intended to bring music to a worldly level, showing through music the everyday experiences: railways, factories and urban noises.

The electronic music nowadays.

Today there is a great variety of electronic music, some of them are experimental kinds of music and others are very popular, for example “electronic dance music.” This variety of music started to become very popular from the late 1980s, when there started to appear records that were made using only electronic instruments. This trend has survived more than 30 years and we can still dance electronic music in nightclubs worldwide that are regularly playing electronic dance music. But electronic music is not only for dancing. It’s even very popular among TV channels and radio stations and there are some of them who are exclusively dedicated to this kind of music.

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