Electronic Dance Music Origin 4/14

1955!! I forgot about 1955. Now, 1955 was the year of electronic music's genesis. I mean it. For real. Forget everything I said before.
To find out where electronic music came from, you need to go all the way back to the year 1955,
for that was the year that RCA commissioned Harry Olsen and Herbert Belar to come up with something wacky and
wild to do with the burgeoning electronics industry (something that had stalled in technological development since the 30s until space aliens crashed in Roswell in 1947 and
the government absorbed their technology, which led to rapid advancements in science like plastics, neon, transistors,
and Dick Clark), to which they did. They came out with something they called the RCA Mark II Synthesizer
(there was previously a Mark I, but it was a stupid thing that no one used and no one remembers having existed. Kind of like Streetfighter 1).

That was the first time anyone had ever used that word for a piece of musical equipment. Synthesizer.
They called it that because it was the first musical instrument that was meant to emulate or "synthesize" musical sounds.
Also, they called it that because Synthesizer just sounds so awesome and futuristic, like a favourite delicacy enjoyed by robots in the year 2340.

This was an incredible feat. Before then, if you wanted a piano sound, you had to actually get a piano.
If you wanted to hear a trumpet or a drum, you had to hire a trumpetter or a drummer.
The concept of virtualizing music through artificial means just blew people away.
It wouldn't take long before Synthesizers started becoming self-aware and roaming through the streets of LA looking for Sarah Connor.
Eventually, they just said "fuck this shit", stopped reproducing existing sounds and started making their own,
in ways and manners that no existing musical instrument was capable of doing. Like the sawtooth waveform. Mmmmmmm.....sawtooth.

There were some problems though. For one, the thing was the size of a bus, and secondly, in order to program notes into it you had to use punch cards,
reel-to-reel tape decks, ludicrous speed, masking tape, Unix v0.1 in Assembler and four different forms of karate to get it to belch out anything.
And when it did, it was hardly music. More like an annoying whine. Still, what it proposed was promising. It just wasn't useful for anything yet.
But hey....even Superman was only capable of lifting a car when he was a kid.

But it did do one thing really cool: it allowed you to make your own music as you composed it. It was an analogue, real-time beast that took four men to operate,
but everything was real and instant. Serious music composers had never done anything like that before.
It's unfortunate that the only people who got to fiddle around with it were boring stiffs who like to take all the fun out of music.

Fuente: Ishkur's Guide