It’s easy to get the impres­sion that enthu­si­asts of elec­tron­ic music lis­ten to noth­ing else. (Not that it isn’t true for some of them, who tend to rel­e­gate them­selves to small­er sub­gen­res: con­sult Ishkur’s Guide to Elec­tron­ic Music for a map of the son­ic ter­ri­to­ry.) And it’s equal­ly easy to believe that, if you aren’t explic­it­ly into elec­tron­ic music, then you don’t lis­ten to it. But in fact, its his­to­ry is one of long-term inte­gra­tion so thor­ough that many of us fre­quent­ly lis­ten to elec­tron­ic music — or at any rate, elec­tron­ic-adja­cent music — with­out being con­scious of that fact.

Watch the video above, a 24-minute jour­ney through the evo­lu­tion of elec­tron­ic music from 1929 to 2019, and take note of how many songs you know after hear­ing them for only a few sec­onds. Ear­ly exper­i­ments by the likes of Olivi­er Mes­si­aen, Hal­im El-Dabh, and Rune Lind­blad may ring no bells (and to the unini­ti­at­ed, may not sound like music at all). Doc­tor Who fans will perk up when the time­line reach­es 1963, with the appear­ance of that show’s theme song — a record­ing by Delia Der­byshire, inci­den­tal­ly, whose pio­neer­ing work we’ve often fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. The first piece of full-fledged pop music is Ger­shon Kings­ley’s “Pop­corn,” from 1969, one of those songs whose melody we all know even if we’d nev­er be able to come up with the title.

In the mid-sev­en­ties, the names now wide­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the devel­op­ment of mod­ern elec­tron­ic music start to emerge: Kraftwerk’s “Auto­bahn” in 1974, Tan­ger­ine Dream’s “Ruby­con” in 1975, Jean-Michel Jar­re’s “Oxy­gene” in 1976. But more impor­tant to the his­to­ry of pop­u­lar cul­ture is the song that rep­re­sents the fol­low­ing year: Don­na Sum­mer’s hit “I Feel Love,” which was co-pro­duced by a cer­tain Gior­gio Moroder. Per­haps the defin­ing fig­ure of elec­tron­ic music’s pas­sage through the dis­cos into the main­stream, Moroder made an even big­ger impact in 1978 with his own instru­men­tal com­po­si­tion “Chase,” which won him an Acad­e­my Award by being includ­ed in the film Mid­night Express.

The movies did a great deal to sell the world on the fusion of elec­tron­ic tech­nol­o­gy and pop music in the eight­ies. Who in the devel­oped world — or indeed, in most of the devel­op­ing world — could fail to rec­og­nize, for instance, Harold Fal­ter­mey­er’s “Axel F”? (And sure­ly nobody who came of age at the time of A Night at the Rox­bury can claim igno­rance of Had­daway’s “What Is Love.”) As this video assem­bles its his­to­ry, elec­tron­ic music finds its way back to the dance floor in the nineties, and it more or less stays there through the twen­ty-tens; per­haps you would’ve had to spend a lot of time in the clubs in that decade to know such seem­ing­ly era-defin­ing names as Marsh­mel­lo, Armin van Buuren, Shapov, Major Laz­er, and DJ Snake. But from an elec­tron­ic-influ­enced hit like Ed Sheer­an’s “Shape of You,” alas, there was no escape.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ishkur’s Guide to Elec­tron­ic Music: An Inter­ac­tive, Ency­clo­pe­dic Data Visu­al­iza­tion of 120 Years of Elec­tron­ic Music

How Gior­gio Moroder & Don­na Summer’s “I Feel Love” Cre­at­ed the “Blue­print for All Elec­tron­ic Dance Music Today” (1977)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

What is Elec­tron­ic Music?: Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Musi­cian Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

A Huge Anthol­o­gy of Noise & Elec­tron­ic Music (1920–2007) Fea­tur­ing John Cage, Sun Ra, Cap­tain Beef­heart & More

Dis­cov­er­ing Elec­tron­ic Music: 1983 Doc­u­men­tary Offers a Fun & Edu­ca­tion­al Intro­duc­tion to Elec­tron­ic Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Between 750 BC and 400 BC, the Ancient Greeks com­posed songs meant to be accom­pa­nied by the lyre, reed-pipes, and var­i­ous per­cus­sion instru­ments. More than 2,000 years lat­er, mod­ern schol­ars have final­ly fig­ured out how to recon­struct and per­form these songs with (it’s claimed) 100% accu­ra­cy.

Writ­ing on the BBC web­site, Armand D’An­gour, a musi­cian and tutor in clas­sics at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty, notes:

[Ancient Greek] instru­ments are known from descrip­tions, paint­ings and archae­o­log­i­cal remains, which allow us to estab­lish the tim­bres and range of pitch­es they pro­duced.

And now, new rev­e­la­tions about ancient Greek music have emerged from a few dozen ancient doc­u­ments inscribed with a vocal nota­tion devised around 450 BC, con­sist­ing of alpha­bet­ic let­ters and signs placed above the vow­els of the Greek words.

The Greeks had worked out the math­e­mat­i­cal ratios of musi­cal inter­vals — an octave is 2:1, a fifth 3:2, a fourth 4:3, and so on.

The nota­tion gives an accu­rate indi­ca­tion of rel­a­tive pitch.

So what did Greek music sound like? Below you can lis­ten to David Creese, a clas­si­cist from the Uni­ver­si­ty of New­cas­tle, play­ing “an ancient Greek song tak­en from stone inscrip­tions con­struct­ed on an eight-string ‘canon’ (a zither-like instru­ment) with mov­able bridges. “The tune is cred­it­ed to Seik­i­los,” says Archae­ol­o­gy Mag­a­zine.

For more infor­ma­tion on all of this, read D’An­gour’s arti­cle over at the BBC.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Octo­ber, 2013.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sound­ed Like When Sung in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

Hear Homer’s Ili­ad Read in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

Hear the Old­est Song in the World: A Sumer­ian Hymn Writ­ten 3,400 Years Ago

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an, the Lan­guage of Mesopotamia

Hip-hop was once a sub­cul­ture, but by now it’s long since been one of the unques­tion­ably dom­i­nant forms of pop­u­lar music — not just in Amer­i­ca, and not just among young peo­ple. There are, of course, still a fair few hip-hop hold­outs, but even they’ve come to know a thing or two about it through cul­tur­al osmo­sis alone. They’re aware, for exam­ple — whether or not they approve of it — that rap­pers usu­al­ly per­form over music con­struct­ed through sam­pling: that is, stitched togeth­er out of pieces of oth­er songs. If you’re not sure how it works, you can see the process clear­ly visu­al­ized in the video above from sam­ple provider Track­lib.

Offer­ing a break­down of sam­pling as it’s hap­pened through “fifty years of hip-hop,” the video begins even before the genre real­ly took shape, in 1973. It was then that DJ Kool Herc devel­oped what he called “the ‘Mer­ry-Go-Round’ Tech­nique,” an ear­ly exam­ple of which involved using dual turnta­bles to switch back and forth between the instru­men­tal breaks of James Brown’s “Give It Up or Tur­nit a Loose” and the Incred­i­ble Bon­go Band’s “Bon­go Rock.” The orig­i­nal idea was to give dancers more time to do their thing, but when the MCs picked up their micro­phones and start­ed get­ting cre­ative, a new music took shape almost imme­di­ate­ly.

Main­stream Amer­i­ca got its first taste of hip-hop in 1979, with the release of “Rap­per’s Delight” by the Sug­arhill Gang. In its repeat­ing rhythm part, many would have rec­og­nized Chic’s “Good Times,” which actu­al­ly was­n’t a sam­ple but an inter­po­la­tion, i.e. a re-record­ing. This drew a law­suit — hard­ly the last of its kind in hip-hop — but it also set thou­sands of DJs-to-be dig­ging through their record col­lec­tions in search of usable breaks. Dis­co proved a fount of inspi­ra­tion for ear­ly hip-hop, but so did jazz and even elec­tron­ic music, as demon­strat­ed by Afri­ka Bam­baataa and the Soul Son­ic Force’s “Plan­et Rock,” which sam­pled Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express.”

As sam­pling goes, noth­ing is artis­ti­cal­ly off-lim­its; in some sense, the less imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able, the bet­ter. With the evo­lu­tion of audio edit­ing tech­nol­o­gy, hip-hop artists have long gone even fur­ther in mak­ing these bor­rowed clips their own by slow­ing them down; speed­ing them up; chop­ping them into pieces and rear­rang­ing them; and lay­er­ing them one atop anoth­er. This some­times caus­es prob­lems, as when the dif­fi­cul­ty of licens­ing De La Soul’s many and var­ied source mate­ri­als kept their cat­a­log out of offi­cial avail­abil­i­ty. Along with A Tribe Called Quest, also fea­tured in this video, De La Soul are, of course, known as hip-hop groups beloved by music nerds. But if you seri­ous­ly break down any major work of hip-hop, you’ll find that all its artists are music nerds at heart.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Brief His­to­ry of Sam­pling: From the Bea­t­les to the Beast­ie Boys

How Sam­pling Trans­formed Music and Cre­at­ed New Tapes­tries of Sound: An Inter­ac­tive Demon­stra­tion by Producer/DJ Mark Ron­son

The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6‑Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sam­pling Rev­o­lu­tion

The Sur­pris­ing­ly Long His­to­ry of Auto-Tune, the Vocal-Pro­cess­ing Tech­nol­o­gy Music Crit­ics Love to Hate

Hear Every Sam­ple on the Beast­ie Boys’ Acclaimed Album, Paul’s Bou­tique – and Dis­cov­er Where They Came From

Hear De La Soul’s High­ly Acclaimed & Influ­en­tial Hip-Hop Albums Stream­ing Free for the First Time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.