Electronic music history: from the Telharmonium to the club

Before the beat (1897–1949)

Electronic music begins as an engineering problem: how do you produce a pitch without a string, a reed or a column of air?

In 1897 Thaddeus Cahill patented the Telharmonium, an instrument that generated sound with rotating tone wheels and sent it down telephone lines. It weighed around 200 tonnes, it was barely audible, and it ruined its investors. It also proved the central idea of the next century: sound could be generated electrically and transmitted like a signal.

What followed was smaller and stranger. Léon Theremin’s theremin (1920) was played by moving your hands through an electromagnetic field, with no contact at all. Maurice Martenot’s Ondes Martenot (1928) added a keyboard and a ring controller and reached the concert hall. Laurens Hammond’s organ (1935) and the Novachord (1939) brought something less romantic but more important: instruments that stayed in tune and could be manufactured.

None of this was pop music. It was an avant-garde project, and it is the direct root of the experimental branch of the tree — you can still hear its logic in neoclassical and in musique concrète.

Tape and voltage (1950–1969)

Two schools, one question: is the material of music a sound you recorded, or a waveform you invented from nothing?

Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète reversed the problem. Instead of building a tone from oscillators, you recorded the world — trains, footsteps, voices — and cut the tape. The studio became the instrument and editing became composition. In Germany, Karlheinz Stockhausen pushed the opposite way: purely synthetic sound, organised with serialist rules. The WDR studio in Cologne produced tape pieces with no acoustic source at all, which is electronic music in the strictest sense.

The hardware then left the university. The RCA Mark II (1957) was the first programmable synthesizer, a room-sized machine that read punched paper. Don Buchla’s modular systems (1963) replaced the keyboard with touch-sensitive plates on purpose, to stop people playing them like pianos. Robert Moog commercialised his modular synth in 1964, and four years later Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach sold hundreds of thousands of copies of Bach played entirely on a Moog. The Mellotron (1963) did something different again: it played tape loops of real instruments from a keyboard, which is a sampler wearing an orchestra’s clothes.

This is where the tree forks. One path leads to tape music, noise and distortion and the academic avant-garde. The other leads, through ambient, to the idea that a machine can make a room feel different.

The body (1970–1979)

Electronic music discovers rhythm, and stops being a laboratory curiosity. Two German bands and one Italian producer do most of the work.

Kraftwerk, formed in Düsseldorf in 1970, is the hinge of this entire history. Autobahn (1974) was a hit built out of synthetic pulses, and it made an argument that would hold for the next fifty years: electronic music could be pop, and pop could be machine-made. Their influence runs through krautrock, electro and techno in a way that is almost impossible to overstate.

In parallel, two other things happened. Brian Eno, working with tape loops and generative processes, built the grammar of ambient music: music as a system rather than a performance. And in Munich, Giorgio Moroder produced Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” (1977), a disco record with a fully synthesised backing track. Disco gave electronic music a dancefloor, and electro-disco and space disco are its direct descendants.

The hardware accelerated all of it. Roland set up its instrument division in 1975, the CR-78 (1978) was the first drum machine with a microprocessor, and the Fairlight CMI (1979) was the first commercially available digital sampler. Gary Numan took synthesizers to the top of the UK charts with The Pleasure Principle (1979), and Yellow Magic Orchestra, formed in Tokyo in 1978, made electronic pop that still sounds like the future.

The machine (1980–1989)

Two drum machines and one bass synthesizer, sold cheaply and used wrongly, produce most of the genres this site documents.

The Roland TR-808 (1980) made its kick drum out of a tuned sine wave, which is why it sounds like nothing acoustic. The TR-909 (1983) combined analogue and digital. The TB-303 (1981) was a failure as a bass guitar emulator and became, in the wrong hands, the sound of acid. Add MIDI (1983), which let machines talk to each other, and the Akai MPC60 (1988), which put a sampler, pads and a sequencer in one box, and the studio stopped being a room.

Chicago: Frankie Knuckles took a residency at The Warehouse in 1982, and house music took its name from the room. Jesse Saunders’s “On & On” (1984) is usually named as the first house record, Phuture’s “Acid Tracks” (1987) defined acid house, and the Second Summer of Love (1988) put it in front of tens of thousands of people across the UK.

Detroit: Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson built techno out of Kraftwerk, funk and a futurist reading of a collapsing city. The compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit (1988) gave the genre its international name. In the Bronx, Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” (1982) had already fused hip hop with Kraftwerk to define electro. And in Germany, the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) turned a marginal scene into a national export.

By the end of the decade the barriers had collapsed from both sides: the Yamaha DX7 (1983) made digital synthesis affordable, E-mu’s Emulator II (1985) expanded the sonic palette of pop, and Warp Records (1989) began building a home for what would soon be called IDM.

Fragmentation (1990–today)

Once publishing a genre costs nothing, you get hundreds of them. The tree you are looking at is the result.

The 1990s turned local scenes into global genres within a couple of years. Trance emerged from European clubs — “The Age of Love” (1990) is the usual starting point — and split into progressive, uplifting, hard and goa branches. Jungle appeared in the UK in 1993 and hardened into drum and bass by 1995. Trip-hop came out of Bristol, and IDM came out of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilation (1992) and Aphex Twin’s early records.

The tools kept lowering the price of entry. Cubase VST (1996) moved the studio into the computer. Ableton Live (2001) made the laptop a live instrument. Kontakt (2002) turned sampling into a software problem. Napster (1999) and then Spotify (2008) rewrote distribution, and Boiler Room (2010) changed what a performance was supposed to look like.

The result is the tree you are looking at. Dubstep left South London in 2002 and split into brostep, riddim, deep and melodic branches within a decade. Footwork arrived from Chicago. Hyperpop was named by PC Music around 2013 and broke through with SOPHIE and 100 gecs, while deconstructed club, phonk, amapiano and hardwave followed. The last fifteen years have produced more named micro-genres than the previous fifty, mostly because the cost of publishing one is now close to zero.

That is also why the names stop meaning much on their own. Two producers can use the same label for sounds that share nothing but a tempo range, and a scene can be named before anybody agrees on what it sounds like. The useful question is no longer “what genre is this?” but “what did it come out of?” — which is the question a tree answers and a list does not.