The Routledge Handbook to Rethinking the History of Technology-Based Music

This Handbook explores and critiques a new sonic reality — one which unearths new narratives that chart embryonic practices from the early twentieth century that have developed in parallel with accepted narratives of electronic music.

Today’s musical and artistic practices within technology-based music represent radical changes in production, engagement, and dissemination of all sonic arts for composers, musicians, listeners, media content creators and casual music users. Constant everyday exposure to electronic or processed sounds influences our listening skills and listening intentionality, and our ideas of what constitutes valuable sound experiences have expanded radically. What are we listening to? How and why? This new reality is also more inclusive, and technology-borne music now appears as the new folk music – unwritten, improvised, and finding its own relevance unfettered by the traditional hierarchies of taste. It is also where black and Asian technology-based experimental music is emerging with its own sonic genealogy; where music is no longer limited to sound only but can be more fruitfully seen as a branch of media arts, combining diverse materials, techniques and tools into more holistic experiences.