Classical visions

The origins of electronic music lie in the creative imagination. The technologies that are used to make electronic music are a realisation of the human urge to originate, record and manipulate sound. Although the term electronic music refers specifically to music made using electronic devices and, by extension, to certain mechanical devices powered by electricity, the musical possibilities that these technologies have opened up are a recurring theme in literature, art, engineering and philosophy. But it was not until the turn of the twentieth century, when electronic and electromechanical instruments started to become a physical reality, that certain forward looking musicians began to turn to the new possibilities already imagined by others.

Francis Bacon's celebrated description of a modern sound studio is one of many examples of such a creative imagination. The New Atlantis, written in 1624 and published in 1626, was a utopian tale of mariners in the southeastern seas who were shipwrecked upon an island containing a model civilisation, in which science and spirituality found union. The ‘sound-houses’ passage is one of a series of descriptions, given by the island's governor, of its various knowledge resources and houses of learning.