Electronic Dance Music Origin 5/14

Hold on a sec! Since we're looking for the REAL origin of electronic music,
it only makes sense that we go to the source--the guy who actually coined the term "electronic music".
And for that we have to go back to 1949, where Werner Meyer Eppler wrote one of the most earth-shattering essays in 20th century music:
"Electronic Tone Generation, Electronic Music and Synthetic Speech", outlining the freaky future that popular music was about to undertake as a terrifying warning to all mankind.

Speaking of which, allow me to go on a bit of an aside here:
What was with all these brilliant eggheads in the 40s foretelling the future with such grim accuracy?
Maybe they were tipped off by the Roswell aliens or maybe--due to the fact that just a few years earlier they had figured out how to blow the planet to kingdom come and
were feeling awfully proud of themselves for it--they wanted to do something that would REALLY fuck us up (like nuclear bombs didn't impress us enough.
No, really guys. What, were people saying "Pshaw, Any eight year old can slam plutonium particles together and release a biblical amount of energy.
Try again, fuckheads." What more did they want, rocket cars and an atmosphere on the moon?).

Anyways, it's pretty strange to see a whole bunch of post-war visionaries--some scientists, most not--accurately predicting future living,
complete with technological advancements and all. You got George Orwell, who wrote "Politics and the English Language",
detailing the perils of political correctness 50 years before it was canonized. And you got Vannevar Bush, who wrote "As We May Think",
which foretold hypertext, miniature cameras and the rise of the internet.
Yeah, this guy fucking predicted the motherfucking internet at a time when there were only six computers in the entire world,
and four of them only knew how to decode secret Nazi messages, store recipes, and decode secret Nazi recipes and store them.
There was also Aldous Huxley, who warned about the "assembly line-ation" of life, harbinging the era of suburbanization and consumerism.
A society of Nostradamus', I swear. Why aren't there people like this today? Where are today's visionaries? Was the war generation simply smarter than us?
They were certainly better at killing one another.

Anyways, Eppler took his ideas to Bell labs, and came out with what he called a synthetic speech encoder...or a Vocoder for short.
And then he went on tour talking about his amazing ideas about this new thing called "electronic music",
because everything at this stage was simply theoretical. Like the guys above, nothing they talked about was technically doable yet.
But it would be, if they sat around long enough, shut their eyes tight and put their fingers to their temples, and willed it to happen.

So there you go. Werner Meyer Eppler. The founder of electronic music.

Fuente: Ishkur's Guide