Electronic Music
While electronic music and Musique Concrète might appear similar, the earlier works in particular were composed in a distinctly different fashion. Of the two forms, the composition of early electronic music has more in common with traditional composition, works often being conceived, ideas written down or planned, then the sound realised. In comparison, Musique Concrète took prepared, existing sound, and let the work define itself as the material was moulded, without using a preconceived plan as traditional composition often does. The pre calculated nature of electronic music was partly due to the use of pitch frequencies rather than conventional western note names, and the information about the sounds to be used was often recorded on graph paper rather than using western notation. In providing such documentation for a proposed work, composers had to find a method of being able to represent all the parameters necessary to then realise the sound, as well as pitch these included volume, attack, decay and reverberation. With such accurate information needed, the result is an incredibly complex score that details hundreds of sound events, their qualities, and their relationship to each other with sounds superimposed on each other. For this reason, very few scores of electronic music are actually published, as a work seems to exist in a more accessible and profitable form when recorded.
Electronic music developed much slower than Musique Concrète, mainly due to limited access composers initially had to studio facilities, and the limited nature of the studios themselves that simply meant that the synthesis of sounds was rather time consuming. Early Studios generally contained sine tone generators, white noise generators and square wave generators, with which sounds could be made. Sine tone generators produce pure sounds at specific frequencies with no harmonics, and were used to create tones that when put together would result in sounds of individual timbre dependent on the frequencies used. Square wave generators in comparison create richer sounds that seem to share more qualities with traditional sounds. White noise contains all audible frequencies, and to the human ear appears to have both a general sound made up of all its components, as well as more defined movement within this sound due to the dynamic inconsistency of the frequencies. Despite the fact that the distribution of frequencies is even, the human ear has a varying sensitivity to these frequencies, making some sounds more prominent than others. The qualities of the sounds available to the early electronic musician could be carefully considered and effectively used to create unique effects. These were not the only tools at the electronic composers disposal, there were also further ways that technology would let them modify the sounds they had generated.[i] White noise could be filtered to select a band of frequencies, and in combination with the characteristic movement within white noise due to varying dynamic levels, filtering to a band of noise would create a sound that appeared to be moving; something that could provide an interesting contrast within a piece when combined with sine tones.