Electronic Music: Definitions

I. Sound

I have categorized the sounds below according to type: drum, bass, key/synth, and vocal. In each category, there is a traditional sound and one or more non-traditional sounds. However, I do not define "traditional" sounds as emanating from live instruments (guitars, drums, piano, etc.). Rather, I define "traditional" sounds as sounding traditional. So drum sounds made on a drum machine that try to resemble the "live" sound of a drum set are "traditional," even though they were not made on a real drum set.

By drum, I mean, simply, any sound that functions as a rhythm in a song (with the exception of the bass). In electronic music, that is nearly every sound in every song. Hence, this list comes first and is the most comprehensive.

Live drum and percussion sounds. Most non-electronic music uses this sound exclusively, even if a drum machine or a sampler makes the sounds. As well, a lot of rap and hip hop uses traditional drum sounds; in a lot of cases, like the work of DJ Shadow, the drum sounds are sampled. But because the samples still sound like live instruments, I still consider them traditional sounds.

Most music uses samplers nowadays, but a lot of music tries to cover it up. That's not what I'm talking about here. Sampled/Found sounds are any sounds that are cut up and fragmented. They can be live drum, drum machine, synth, or computer-generated sounds. They can be everyday objects like kitchen appliances or rocks. If they are cut-up and bastardized so that the original sound (the sound's source) is unrecognizable or recognized as something entirely different, they're sampled. Flanger's Templates is a perfect example of this style, as is track two on Autechre's ep7, which takes a vocal track and rips it up to create a rhythm.

These are all sounds that sound like they were made on a computer or on early electronic drum machines like 808s and 909s. Analog synth and sound effect sounds are common in all types of music, but are routinely used for rhythm tracks in electronic music. Two Lone Swordsmen use many bubble-hiss sounds as rhythm on their Stay Down. Likewise, experimental "noise" sounds are made by computers or electronic instruments when they break down or screw up, and a lot of electronic musicians get a lot of use out of these sounds. One great example of this is the music of Pole, which includes static and other "noises" that are routinely removed in the recording and mastering process. Autechre also uses a lot of noise and feedback as rhythm–see track two on Chiastic Slide.

Bass is the underlying heart of almost all rhythm-based music. Although drum sounds in electronic music are varied, bass sounds are familiar and consist of two different categories.

This is any sound that resembles an acoustic or electric bass. Nearly all electronic music uses traditional bass sounds, even if they are tweaked or distorted to some extent. The strongest bass sounds come in hip-hop and drum 'n bass. Listen to any Metalheadz track and you'll hear some mean, throbbing, shit-eating bass.

303 bass sounds are common in all dance music; the sound is very distinctive and easily recognizable. 303s sound a little less like a traditional bass; in fact, they are almost bass equivalent of analog synths and/or 808s and 909s. Almost all dance music (or IDM), from Carl Craig to Deep Dish to Roni Size to Autechre, uses the 303 sound to some extent.

I put keyboard and string sound together because they both function the same way in electronic music: namely, to add melody and effect to songs. The sounds mention below are incredibly varied, so the list here merely acts to separate the unique, warbling sounds of synths from the more traditional sounds of live instruments.

Pianos, organs, violins, guitar: they're all traditional instruments, and their sounds show up in electronic music. Of course, a lot of piano, organ, etc. sounds are actually made on computers or synths, so "traditional" really means sounds that sound like they were made on live instruments. Some examples include Gus Gus's "Ladyshave" and its great organ melody, the guitar riff on Fatboy Slim's "Rockarfellar Skank," and the piano sound on my own song, "Autechresque."

Any music that is generated electronically is synthesized, but synthesizers are commonly defined as keyboards that emulate the sounds made by traditional instruments, especially pianos, organs, and string instruments. What makes synths so popular in electronic music is that these synth sounds, which originally tried to copy the sound of a guitar or piano, actually created entirely new sounds that were very different from anything a live instrument could possibly reproduce. Hence, the "synth" sounds I refer to here are the sounds which generally comprise the melody of electronic songs, but which do not seem to emanate from any distinct, traditional instrument. The bubbling weirdness on Cristian Vogel's "Sarcastically Tempered Powers" is a great example of a synth sound: it is the central melody in the song, and it resembles nothing a traditional instrument could possibly sound like (unless it was underwater). Another great example of synth sounds are the quasi-string sound on Bola's Soup, which seem to be a weird amalgamation of organ and violin.

Unlike other forms of popular music, vocals are not really an absolute. This is largely because electronic musicians are nerdy men and women working in their bedroom; they don't have enough money to hire singers or to buy studio time to record vocals properly. It only takes a few thousand US dollars to make an electronic album; it takes that much just to talk to a good singer. Nevertheless, there are plenty of electronic music artists who add vocals, so this category is as necessary, if not as important, as the others.

This is simply singing. You know, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, Johnny Rotten, Joni Mitchell. That kind of thing. There's plenty of vocals in electronic music (though not usually in the experimental or IDM side of things). Some examples you'll find include Super Collider, Andrea Parker, Massive Attack, Everything but the Girl, and Presence.

I trust that everyone has heard of rap. Well, then, I don't need to explain it. Tricky and company are represented on this site; no doubt, there will be more in the future, unless all rap becomes a ripoff of Puff Daddy.

Sampled voices are very common in electronic music. They are usually sampled from movies or other records, and they usually have a lot of camp appeal. Attilo Mineo's album has an authentic voice-over because it was recorded in the 1950s, but if you took the voice-over out and put it on, say, a Bochum Welt song, it would fit right in. Samples can be about anything or anyone, and generally add a funny or ironic comment on modern society or the music itself. A lot of samples are from old science fiction films or newsreels/documentaries. Tricky, for instance, uses a sample from the excellent 1990s film The Rapture on his Maxingquaye album; he also uses a sample from Blade Runner. The Propellerheads use a great sample from some newsreel at the start of "Take California."

These are the weird vocals you hear on songs like The Beastie Boys' "Intergalactic" or Add N to (X)'s music (which is where the Beasties got the idea). It's a ripoff of the Macintosh "Speech" emulator (that and the movie, WarGames).

So, after the sounds, what else is there in music? Why, structure. What else? Why, the act of listening to the music. That's what I mean by shape: the way the shape is set up, how fast or slow it is, and what sorts of reactions it produces in people.

By structure, I simply mean the shape the song takes: the movement from the beginning of the song to the end. Again, I am using broad and (intentionally) vague definitions here; many songs stray from these absolutes readily and happily.

Traditional popular songs have verses, choruses, and more verses. Or they have verse after verse after verse. Or they have chorus after chorus after chorus. Whatever. They're all organized around a single principle: hooks and spaces between the hooks. Most electronic music (at least, the electronic music I review at this site) refrains from hooks for various aesthetic reasons, but there are exceptions–very good exceptions. Super Collider's Head On album, for example, is awash in pop music; but it's such weird, unsettling pop music that it is hard to realize that the song structures are, actually, about the same as those on Britney Spears songs. Other traditional (albeit electronic) songs can be heard on albums by Andrea Parker, Bochum Welt, Tricky, I-F, Leila, and "electronica" supergroups like The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, and Underworld.

This is, by far, the most common electronic music structure. "Building block" songs start out simple, with a rhythm or a melodic line. Then, by adding one line or sound at a time, the song builds into an increasingly complex monster until either it pauses, returns to one line, and starts again or it simply ends. Often "building" songs will have an additional structure. For example, a song will pause in the middle, a new structure will be introduced and then added to the preceding structure. Or a song will begin with one structure and then stop, add what amounts to a chorus in the middle of the song, and then return to the original structure. But this variation really only adds to, rather than detracts from, the basic "building block" nature of the song A classic example of this style is Carl Craig's "Televised Green Smoke."

Some songs are just rhythms or just melodic lines: nothing more. These songs are often called "ambient" or "minimal" because they provide an atmosphere, a mood, rather than taking the listener on a journey (as is the case in most songs). Brian Eno is considered the originator of this genre, but he is by no means alone; Aphex Twin, Harold Budd, Tangerine Dream are other key players in this scene. I should mention that a lot of music that is called ambient actually does have a building block structure (see Global Communications). But music that doesn't seem to really go anywhere, that just repeats stuff indefinitely, is definitely ambient. Jake Mandell has a weird little album out that perfectly exemplifies this style. It's called Healing, and it's a simple 30 or 40 second traditional/analog synth melody that is repeated over and over for about 70 minutes. Boring? Perhaps, but it certainly establishes mood!

Tempo is easy. It defines how fast a song moves, specifically in relation to beats per minute (bpm). Most DJs and most DJ magazines are awash in bpm counts of popular tracks, because that number defines what kind of a song it is and what types of reactions it will receive from crowds.

Fast, frenetic rhythms and/or melodies characterize "hot" tempo. This is music with a lot of "notes," especially drum sounds, and usually clocks in somewhere between 150-210+ bpm. Solar X's Little Green Automatic and everything by Metalheadz are good examples of this style, as are the last few albums by Autechre. It is also the most common speed for house, speed garage, and all the other music commonly played at clubs and festivals.

Medium music usually clocks in between 110-150. It is the standard speed for most of the artists reviewed on this site. The higher end (140-150) is considered the optimal "steady" speed for dancing--that is, when you plan to make people dance for a long, long time. 110-140 is about the average speed for listening music. Artists as diverse as the Mille Plateaux gang, Jake Mandell, Autechre, Solvent, Boards of Canada, and Cristian Vogel generally stay within this tempo.

This is slow, plodding music that takes it sweet time getting somewhere. Most ambient songs fit into this category, whose bpm count is between 60-110 and can often even dip lower than this. I have a song called "Evil Bacon" that clocks in at 64 bpm and is a good example of this style. All ambient music, including that of Aphex Twin, Global Communications, some of the slower, weirder German minimal stuff, and a lot of dub music (Lee Perry in particular) fall into this category.

Color is the texture of the song--the way the song feels when you listen to it, or the way you feel while listening to the song. Of course, this is an incredibly subjective thing, so what I've done is categorized music according to two types: bright and dark. Bright music focuses on the high-frequency sounds that are usually associated with the "treble" volume on your stereo. Dark music, likewise, focuses on the low-frequency sounds that are most closely related to bass.

Bright sounds emphasize high-notes or trebles. This not to say that the music is cheerier or more optimistic than dark music; it merely describes where the musician places the emphasis. Hence bright songs cover the full range of musical styles, from minimal music of Plastikman to the weird frenzy of Solar X to the abstract jazz of Flanger.

This is the absence of sound; music so stark and minimalist that it's almost not there. The preeminent artist in this genre is Plastikman (ironically, from The Great White North, Canada). Pole's music also fits into this category.

Yellow is a happy, bright color; it's also not a color you usually associate with electronic music. But there are plenty of "yellow" artists, whose music is bright and warm and happy. Bochum Welt, To Rococo Rot, and Leila, for instance, make music filled with playfulness and silliness. Also, Skam's Skampler is filled with many fun, happy songs by the likes of Lego Feet and Jega.

Red is a hot, passionate color, but in this list, I see "red" music as music that overwhelms your senses with speed, intensity, and a multitude of sounds. Solar X, Jake Mandell, Josh Wink, and most house and speed garage music fits in this category. Anything that either makes you dance or makes your ears bleed with high frequency synth and computer generated drum sounds fits here.

This is pastoral, meditative music that relies on ambience and atmospherics, along with beats and melodies, to create a mood. I'm not talking about those "Magic Mood" albums you see advertised on TV; I'm talking electronic pastoral, which means music that creates organic, lush environments with electronic instruments. Boards of Canada, Plasmalamp, and the most recent Mu-Ziq are the most obvious representatives of this color; however, even Two Lone Swordsmen fit here, because they do such a great job creating music that bubbles and overflows with life.

Dark music is music that emphasizes the low end, or bass, sounds that are so common in all variations of hip hop and in the more extreme (that is, louder) areas of electronic music, like industrial. Of course, bass is much more important to hip hop than it is to industrial, but the color of the song remains the same in both: an emphasis on low frequencies. It doesn't matter whether those frequencies are created on a bass guitar, a synth, a drum, or someone's ass; if it's low, it's dark.

In music, blue means blues or jazz. Both of these musics rely on a heavy bass framework. In electronic music, this also applies; however, I would add that "blue" music is also slower than the standard dance track. Flanger's music, for example, because it is fundamentally jazz that has been fucked with, really fits here. Another artist that fits here, however, is not so obvious: Bola. His music is dominated by deep, rich bass sounds, which serve as the center around which the atmospherics revolve. Another, obvious inclusion here has to be the dub-influenced sound of Bristol, best exemplified by Portishead and Massive Attack.

If it's brown, flush it down. Same applies for music. Brown is the deep, dark bass sound of drum 'n bass, hip hop, and anything else that relies on big bad booms. This is uptempo bass music: Metalheadz, Wu Tang Clan, DJ Shadow, an so on.

This is the computer-driven weirdness we all know and love from the likes of Autechre/Gescom, JP Buckle, Speedy J, the earlier Mu-Ziq albums, V/VM, the crazier songs on Blip Bleep, and Flanger's more sampled stuff are all examples of computer weirdness.

Industrial noise, from Boyd Rice and Throbbing Gristle to Chaos AD and Speedranch, is all about evil, noisy weirdness. This is some of the scariest music around, and for good reason: they manage to turn high notes into low notes and make the low notes even lower, so that everything sounds like it's coming up from hell. Great, sick stuff.