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Robert Austin

The Tone Generation

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Back in the 1950s, electronic music was just emerging from the musique concrete movement, with their massively spliced magnetic tape assemblies and shellac records. In those days, lone composers might assemble a few military-surplus audio oscillators and filters with a tape recorder, and cobble together odd sounds by hand; the modular synthesizers made famous by Robert Moog in the late 1960's had not yet been conceived of. Some amazing works were created during this period, despite the technical limitations of the time, such as the 1957 composition ?Song of the Second Moon? by ?Tom Dissevelt,? republished in the 1960s, and still found in modern day re-mixes.

Music has long held the power to deeply affect our consciousness and emotional state, but electronic and computer music can be precisely tweaked to create new kinds of sonic tapestry, impossible to generate using conventional techniques. Binaural beats are the easiest to create, requiring just two stable audio oscillators. Clicks, crackles and other spiky waveforms are especially efficient when it comes to generating audio evoked potentials (AEP), and these potentially irritating sonic sources can be effectively masked behind other samples while still achieving their desired goal: namely, the transformation of your current state of awareness into something potentially quite different. The 'ambient' soundscapes of such masters as Robert Rich, Steve Roach, Ian Boddy, Alio Die and others can seemingly move one's awareness into a parallel Universe, even while populating it with strange planets and beings.

British musicians and cultural historians Ken Hollings and Simon James have put together an amazing history of the electronic (later, computer) music movement, resulting in a (currently) 21-part series entitled 'The Tone Generation'. I'd like to take this opportunity to heartily recommend it to anyone interested in this topic, and you can download them all from

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  1. MarkT's Avatar
    I'm going to have to check this out. Thanks for the commentary and link Robert.