Dancing to the Drum Machine is a never-before-attempted history of what is perhaps the most controversial musical instrument ever invented: the drum machine. Here, author Dan LeRoy reveals the untold story of how their mechanical pulse became the new heartbeat of popular music. The pristine snap of the LinnDrum. The bottom-heavy beats of the Roland 808. The groundbreaking samples of the E-MUSP-1200. All these machines-and their weirder, wilder-sounding cousins-changed composition, recording, and performance habits forever. Their distinctive sounds and styles helped create new genres of music, like hip hop and EDM. But they altered every musical style, from mainstream pop to heavy metal to jazz. Dan LeRoy traces the drum machine from its low-tech beginnings in the Fifties and Sixties to its evolution in the Seventies and its ubiquity in the Eighties, when seemingly overnight, it infiltrated every genre of music. Drum machines put some drummers out of work, while keeping others on their toes. They anticipated virtually every musical trend of the last five decades: sequencing, looping, sampling, and all forms of digital music creation. But the personalities beneath those perfect beats make the story of drum machines a surprisingly human one-told here for the very first time.

(Book). Here's your complete guide to using MIDI synthesizers, samplers, soundcards, sequencers, computers and more The MIDI Companion shows how a MIDI system or systems for a wide range of situations can be assembled quickly, easily and trouble-free. Describes how to synchronize MIDI sequencers, drum machines, multitrack equipment, SMPTE-based equipment, and other MIDI instruments. Describes each and every MIDI code and the techniques used in transmitting these codes between various MIDI devices. Explains how to get the most out of any musical situation that calls for the use of synthesizers and electronic musical instruments. This totally new edition includes more information on the actual applications and musical uses for MIDI. A complete chapter devoted to General MIDI, plus the charts for GM sounds. Two additional new chapters on The MIDI Studio and MIDI And The Personal Computer. New diagrams, updated diagrams, new graphics. Profusely illustrated with pictures, photographs and diagrams, and also includes a detailed glossary.

In this book, scholars and artists explore the relation between electronic music and bodily expression from perspectives including aesthetics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, dance and interactive performance arts, sociology, computer music and sonic arts, and music theory, transgressing disciplinary boundaries and established beliefs. The historic decoupling of action and sound generation might be seen to have distorted or even effaced the expressive body, with the retention of performance qualities via recoupling not equally retaining bodily expressivity. When, where, and what is the body expressed in electronic music then? The authors of this book reveal composers, performers, improvisers and listeners bodies, as well as the works and technologies figurative bodies as a rich source of expressive articulation. Bringing together humanities scholarship and musical arts contingent upon new media, the contributors offer inspiring thought and critical reflection for all those seriously engaged with the aesthetics of electronic music, interactive performance, and the body 's role in aesthetic experience and expression. Performativity is not only seen as being reclaimed in live electronic music, interactive arts, and installations; it is also exposed as embodied in the music and the listeners themselves.

Electroacoustic music, a flourishing medium for over half a century, remains today, in a wide array of technological forms, one of the major areas of creative activity in music. However, it has long been overlooked in theoretical studies--possibly in part because it does away with traditional scores and notation. In this landmark collection, a group of distinguished composers and theorists who have actively worked in the field present detailed analyses of important electroacoustic works while also demonstrating some recent approaches to the analysis of the music of this medium. Included here are discussions of such significant works as Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Gesang der Junglinge "(1955/56), Iannis Xenakis' "Diamorphoses" (1957), and Jean-Claude Risset's "Contours" (1982). Overall, the collection aims to elucidate the sonic design of each of the electroacoustic music works under investigation, using its best examples as a lens through which to examine an unduly neglected genre.

Demonstrating recent techniques in the analysis of electroacoustic music, the volume also considers various compositional approaches as well as computer applications that have become an irreplaceable tool in the composing of this music. So little has been written about this 20th-century art form that Electroacoustic Music: Analytical Perspectives is at once a fresh, bold step forward in musicology and analysis.

A thrilling and tumultuous, behind-the-scenes account of house music in NYC. The Beat, the Scene, the Sound follows DJ Disciple and his behind-the-scenes account of how DJs, promoters, fans, and others transformed house music from a DIY project into an international sensation-dive into the glitzy clubs, underground parties, and the diverse communities who made up the scene amidst the tumult of 1980s/90s-era NYC-between the fall of disco and the rise of EDM. The book unearths many untold stories of the era. When house first rose to prominence in the 1980s, it brought people together-Palladium, Paradise Garage, Tunnel, Zanzibar, Studio 54, and other clubs were going strong. But as DJ Disciple established himself in the scene, he witnessed it shatter. During the crack-cocaine epidemic, he literally dodged bullets bringing his records to and from clubs at night. HIV/AIDS and homophobia threw up fear-based partitions. Then, mayors worked to close the clubs. House music was pushed underground and then abroad to the UK and Europe. Disciple and many other DJs sought to regain a footing in the United States, but that only became possible with the rise of commercialized EDM. With dozens of interviews and historic photographs, The Beat, the Scene, the Sound shows what is possible when you bring people together and what can unravel when you split them apart.

(Book). This is the most comprehensive and insightful study ever published on the pioneers of electric blues guitar including the great Chicago, Mississippi Delta, Louisiana, Texas and West Coast bluesmen. Rollin' and Tumblin' offers extensive interviews with some of the world's most famous blues guitarists, and poignant profiles of historical blues figures. Following a sweeping portrait of blues guitar history, the book features such players as T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin' Hopkins and many more.

Dance Music Spaces: Clubs, Clubbers, and DJs Navigating Authenticity, Branding, and Commercialism is about the production of social, cultural, physical, and digital spaces in dance music, spaces that share features of both rave authenticity and the commercialism of club culture. Using a concept she calls authenticity maneuvering to explain how clubs, clubbers, and DJs navigate authenticity, branding, and commercialism, Danielle Hidalgo argues that the strategic use of a rave ethos bolsters acceptance in dance music spaces while also making commercial practices less visible or problematic. She shows how the presence of both authenticity and commercialism enables and constrains three highly successful women DJs and their colleagues, requiring the ongoing performance of authenticity via branding. This book presents a compelling analysis of the complicated interplay between dancing bodies, digital practices, and spatial offerings in contemporary dance music.

Electronic Dance Music: From Deviant Subculture to Culture Industry explores the subculture's emergence as a deviant subculture. This text analyzes how industry professionals, fans, and public officials helped usher in a new age of EDM, arguing that while the defining features of the subculture made it attractive, they also laid the foundations for outsiders to commodify the movement as a culture industry. Conner and Dickens explore the concept of "commodified resistance" as the mechanism by which the movement's politically dissident features were removed and its place as a multi-billion-dollar industry made possible. Ultimately, this text advocates the continued utility of the culture industry thesis through an empirical analysis of the EDM subculture.

Visual Perception of Music Notation: On-Line and Off Line Recognition addresses the computer recognition of music notation, its interpretation and use within various application contexts. It includes research in the field of image processing and pen-based computing, representation languages and web-based applications. This book consolidates the successes, challenges and questions raised by the computer perception of this music notation language.

This is the first book to develop both the theory and the practice of synthesizing musical sounds using computers. Each chapter starts with a theoretical description of one technique or problem area and ends with a series of working examples (over 100 in all), covering a wide range of applications. A unifying approach is taken throughout; chapter two, for example, treats both sampling and wavetable synthesis as special cases of one underlying technique. Although the theory is presented quantitatively, the mathematics used goes no further than trigonometry and complex numbers. The examples and supported software -- along with a machine-readable version of the text -- are available on the web and maintained by a large online community. The Theory and Techniques of Electronic Music is valuable both as a textbook and as professional reading for electronic musicians and computer music researchers.

Tristram Cary's remarkable encyclopedia is the first comprehensive book on the technology of music. Its 600 copiously illustrated main entries and 200 subsidiary ones cover an immense musical field. Included are entries on traditional and electronic instruments, and on such topics as computer music composition, microphone placement, and psychoacoustics. They are carefully cross-referenced so that readers can approach a topic from different angles and then be drawn into its complexities, both technical and musical, as far as they wish.

This volume will be an essential reference work for music and audio professionals, students, and all music lovers wanting to know more about the techniques behind the music.

The double bass - the preferred bass instrument in popular music during the 1960s - was challenged and subsequently superseded by the advent of a new electric bass instrument. From the mid-1960s and throughout the 1970s, a melismatic and inconsistent approach towards the bass role ensued, which contributed to a major change in how the electric bass was used in performance and perceived in the sonic landscape of mainstream popular music. Investigating the performance practice of the new, melodic role of the electric bass as it appeared (and disappeared) in the 1960s and 1970s, the book turns to the number one songs of the American Billboard Hot 100 charts between 1951 and 1982 as a prime source. Through interviews with players from this era, numerous transcriptions - elaborations of twenty bass related features - are presented. These are juxtaposed with a critical study of four key players, who provide the case-studies for examining the performance practice of the melodic electric bass. This highly original book will be of interest not only to bass players, but also to popular musicologists looking for a way to instigate methodological and theoretical discussions on how to develop popular music analysis.

Software mediates a great deal of human musical activity. The writing, running, and maintenance of code lies at the heart of such software. Code Musicology: From Hardwired to Software argues why it is time for a "code musicology," then outlines what that should entail. A code musicology opens a conduit between musicology and software studies, providing insights into both of these now interlinked fields along the way. It extends an ethnomusicology of technoculture from the world of hardware and the hardwired to software, code, and algorithms. For popular music studies, it helps direct attention to a newly relevant industrial focus-IT and software-centered transnational commerce-as a result of sectorial transformation. Denis Crowdy demonstrates how analysis from software studies, critical code studies, and the digital humanities offers insights into power relations, diversity, and commerce in music. Crowdy weaves readings of code and application programming interfaces (APIs) into the discussion, as well as ethnomusicological fieldwork exploring music and mobile phones from the Global South. Analysis of the author's own music apps and associated distribution infrastructure provides unique insights into the machinations of music "appification."

Innovations in music technology bring with them a new set of challenges for describing and understanding the electroacoustic repertoire. This edited collection presents a state-of-the-art overview of analysis methods for electroacoustic music in this rapidly developing field. The first part of the book explains the needs of differing electroacoustic genres and puts forward a template for the analysis of electroacoustic music. Part II discusses the latest ideas in the field and the challenges associated with new technologies, while Part III explores how analyses have harnessed the new forces of multimedia, and includes an introduction to new software programme EAnalysis, which was created by the editors as the result of an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant. The final part of the book demonstrates these new methods in action, with analyses of key electroacoustic works from a wide range of genres and sources.

As the 1970s gave way to the 80s, New York's party scene entered a ferociously inventive period characterized by its creativity, intensity, and hybridity. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor chronicles this tumultuous time, charting the sonic and social eruptions that took place in the city's subterranean party venues as well as the way they cultivated breakthrough movements in art, performance, video, and film. Interviewing DJs, party hosts, producers, musicians, artists, and dancers, Tim Lawrence illustrates how the relatively discrete post-disco, post-punk, and hip hop scenes became marked by their level of plurality, interaction, and convergence. He also explains how the shifting urban landscape of New York supported the cultural renaissance before gentrification, Reaganomics, corporate intrusion, and the spread of AIDS brought this gritty and protean time and place in American culture to a troubled denouement.

Vladimir Ussachevsky (1911-1990), a pioneer in electronic music, was also a composer, teacher and administrator of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. His more than 44 works involving electroacoustics reflect the importance of his contribution to electronic music. Ussachevsky studied with Howard Hanson, Bernard Rogers and Otto Luening and his style varied from neoromantic and Russian Orthodox influences in choral music and other compositions before 1952 to electronic and computer music from 1952 to his death in 1990. This volume in the Greenwood series Bio-Bibliographies in Music includes a brief biography and detailed list of works and performances, discography, mediagraphy, and bibliography of writings about and by Ussachevsky.

Music scholars, especially those with an interest in electronic music or those interested in learning more about Vladimir Ussachevsky, will appreciate the detailed information about his works and writings compiled in this one volume. The works and performances section is organized by type of music, including electronic, orchestral, chamber, keyboard, choral and vocal. Also included are both an alphabetical and chronological list of compositions, a list of Ussachevsky's collaborations, arrangements and sound effects, and an index.

The electronic medium allows any audible sound to be contextualized as music. This creates unique structural possibilities as spectrum, dynamics, space, and time become continuous dimensions of musical articulation. What we hear in electronic music ventures beyond what we traditionally characterize as musical sound and challenges our auditory perception, on the one hand, and our imagination, on the other. Based on an extensive listening study conducted over four years, this book offers a comprehensive analysis of the cognitive processes involved in the experience of electronic music. It pairs artistic practice with theories from a range of disciplines to communicate how this music operates on perceptual, conceptual, and affective levels. Looking at the common and divergent ways in which our minds respond to electronic sound, it investigates how we build narratives from our experience of electronic music and situate ourselves in them.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

From the swelling synths of Depeche Mode to the dance-friendly grooves of Thomas Dolby and from the power ballads of Journey to the New Power Generation of Prince the music of the '80s was infused with the sound of keyboards. You'll learn:THU How technological developments in keyboards helped artists such as Erasure Human League Peter Gabriel Kraftwerk Bruce Hornsby Frank Zappa and Jam and Lewis create entirely new sounds a and how their production tricks can help you make great music today.THU How to recreate the sounds of the '80s using the soft synths and recording software you already have on your computer.THU The breakdowns of the piano and keyboard parts for stadium rockers by Night Ranger Journey and Bon Jovi.

In this book, scholars and artists explore the relation between electronic music and bodily expression from perspectives including aesthetics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, dance and interactive performance arts, sociology, computer music and sonic arts, and music theory, transgressing disciplinary boundaries and established beliefs. The historic decoupling of action and sound generation might be seen to have distorted or even effaced the expressive body, with the retention of performance qualities via recoupling not equally retaining bodily expressivity. When, where, and what is the body expressed in electronic music then? The authors of this book reveal composers', performers', improvisers' and listeners' bodies, as well as the works' and technologies' figurative bodies as a rich source of expressive articulation. Bringing together humanities' scholarship and musical arts contingent upon new media, the contributors offer inspiring thought and critical reflection for all those seriously engaged with the aesthetics of electronic music, interactive performance, and the body's role in aesthetic experience and expression. Performativity is not only seen as being reclaimed in live electronic music, interactive arts, and installations; it is also exposed as embodied in the music and the listeners themselves.