Electronic Dance Music Origin 9/14

Dammit, I forgot about 1876. The year everything changed everything. 1876 was the pivotal year that not just electronic music,
but electricity and electric inventions in general, would be introduced into people's lives. I've been looking at this all wrong.

1876 was important for two reasons: the first was Elisha Gray. This guy got to the meat of the matter, of what makes electronic music electronic.
First, he developed an electromagnetic circuit that discharged a sound. And then, getting the thing to self-vibrate, he made the circuit produce continuous sound.
Through careful manipulation using steel reeds (and magic music gnomes) he figured out how to control the tone of this sound,
thereby creating the first, basic note, single tone oscillator. This was extraordinary for people who just discovered what to do with electricity a generation before.
All that was needed at this point was a simple interface--attach keys to the steel reeds,
and viola...the first actual instrument that produced sound entirely via electrical means.
He called it the "Musical Telegraph" or "Harmonic Telegraph" or the "Electroharmonic Piano".
Jesus, what's with these staunch, stupid-ass latinized Victorian names.
The "Teleharmonocinematagramaphone Electroacoustinoscillating Instrumentality Thing!" Hadn't any of these guys ever heard of marketing?
I would've called it the "Super Space Piano of Doom". For leisurely sporting purposes of a gentlemanly kind. It would've sold much better.
But where did he get the idea to make this self-vibrating electromagnetic circuit thingy in the first place?

He had it in his back pocket for awhile, he just wasn't sure what to do with it. Originally what he was trying to do was figure out a way that,
if controlled right, he could use it to make human speech itself travel electronically through a wire to somewhere miles away where someone else could hear it.
Far out, eh? He called it the telephone, and he had the idea all laid out, and was all ready to head down to the patent office to claim his role as genius inventor of all time,
except he was beaten--by mere hours, no doubt--by Alexander Graham Bell, who kind of beat him to the punch because Bell already had a working model up and running.
His wasn't even theory.

But Bell wasn't interested in electronic music, so he sucks. Who doesn't suck, however, was Thomas Edison,
who was tinkering around with those very same vibrating circuits and steel cylinders, only instead of trying to figure out how to send sound from one place to another,
he figured out how to inscribe it onto a physical surface. Like a book. Only with sound. He called it the Phonograph, and it showed up a year later, in 1877.

That was something no one had ever seen (I mean heard) before. Before 1876, if you wanted to hear music, you had to hire someone to play it. Go to a concert,
a live show, rock out, and all that crap. Rave your ass off. There were no downloading mp3s. There was no mixtape trading. All music was live.
It was impossible to hear a recording, because the concept of recording music didn't exist.
It's a good thing all the classical composers formulated a way to write their compositions on paper, because without the presence of recordable media,
all that shit was gone as soon as you heard it. You couldn't play it back or save it for later.

Yet these masters of sound changed everything in 1876. After this year, it was possible to record, play back, stop, move, shift, transport, edit,
and manipulate sound to your hearts content. Nothing was out of the realm of musical possibility at this point.
Edison and Gray's inventions led to more durable formats of music compacting, stretching, looping, taping and mashing, bringing about the Italian futurist movement,
the dadaists, musique concrete, the first ever commercial tape manipulating hit music that charted in Ross Bagdassarian's campy Alvin and the Chipmunks,
synthesization of sound and, ultimately, sampling. The totality of musicality in sound. And it all started here. In 1876. For real this time.

Fuente: Ishkur's Guide