When the future made noise: electronic music in the 1920s

In the 1920s, electronic music was less a recognised genre than a wager about what sound could become. Futurist manifestos, experimental concerts, inventors and radio engineers treated the machine not merely as a tool for playing existing instruments, but as a new source of rhythm, pitch, volume and timbre. Their arguments form an early map of ideas that later returned in synthesizers, tape studios, electroacoustic instruments and club culture.

The sound of the future, in that decade, was described through vivid but uneven language: “mechanical orchestras”, “ether music”, “radio instruments”, and music generated by rotating machinery. Some forecasts were technically mistaken, others anticipated practices by half a century, and many are persuasive only when heard against their own historical limits. The point is not to treat every novelty as a secret prototype of the modern synthesiser, but to ask what problems the first generation of experimenters were trying to solve.

A useful way to hear the period is as a convergence of media. Amplifiers and loudspeakers separated sound from its physical source; electrical recording changed the route from performer to disc; synchronised cinema joined image and complex noise; and broadcasting carried performances into living rooms. This convergence ran from Italian Futurism to the theremin and ondes Martenot, and then to Australian listeners for whom the wireless was rapidly becoming an ordinary domestic technology.

Before the synthesiser had a name

Electronic sound in the 1920s did not yet have a settled identity. “Electronic” could describe an amplified violin, a recorded voice, an experimental tone generator or an instrument that produced its pitch without strings, reeds or membranes. The important innovation was often the relationship between a sound and its source. Once a note could be controlled electrically, composers could begin thinking about volume, envelope and timbre as independent variables rather than automatic consequences of how an instrument was blown, struck or bowed.

The decisive infrastructural shift arrived with electrical recording in the United States in 1925. Earlier acoustic discs captured relatively weak, distorted sound, while the new microphone system transformed voices and instruments into electrical signals before they were cut into a record. Amplification and loudspeakers offered a similar liberation in performance. An orchestra no longer had to occupy the same acoustic space as its audience, and a quiet experimental sound could be made audible at the scale of a concert hall.

These changes explain why the decade’s predictions often concerned relationships rather than isolated inventions. A recording could preserve a sound that would vanish when it stopped; a loudspeaker could place that sound anywhere; a radio signal could cross a continent. The machine was becoming an intermediary between performer and listener, and composers were beginning to imagine composition as the organisation of signals rather than simply the writing of parts for conventional instruments.

Futurism turns machinery into music

Futurism supplied the decade’s most forceful image of the future. Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto, The Art of Noises, had rejected music as “the exclamations of pain and sorrow” and called for new sonic materials drawn from industry and the city. By the early 1920s, his intonarumori—families of mechanical noise instruments using rotating fans, whistles, metal rasps and other devices—had been heard in European concerts, including Paris in 1921. Their growls, whistles and hisses were crude beside later electronic instruments, but their purpose was radical: to demonstrate that music did not have to begin with accepted orchestral sounds.

Russolo’s instruments also supplied a model for a different kind of authorship. He organised the behaviour of the machines and combined their outputs, much as a later composer would organise oscillators or recorded fragments. The sounds were not merely illustrating traffic or factories. They became the raw material of a performance. In that sense, the intonarumori anticipated industrial music, musique concrète and a large part of the sampling culture that followed decades later.

Paris also provided an environment in which artists could test the boundary between art and machinery. Dada events used gramophones, altered records and improvised noise, while Edgard Varèse’s Octandre of 1923 and Intégrales of 1924 explored instrumental timbres with an intensity suited to the new industrial city. Varèse did not create electronic music in these works, but his writing and compositional practice insisted that the old orchestra was no longer sufficient. The noise orchestra, the amplified concert and the experimental instrumental score all asked the same question: which sounds had not yet entered composition?

A hand in the air and a wire with a voice

Léon Theremin’s instrument made an electronic future physically palpable. He developed the theremin, initially called a terpsitone, around 1920 and gave a public demonstration in 1927. The player stood beside the instrument and moved both hands in the air. One hand controlled pitch through proximity to an antenna; the other influenced volume and timbre. There was no keyboard to press and no physical contact with the sounding mechanism. The gestures resembled conducting, mime or conjuring, yet they produced continuous electronic tones capable of gliding between notes.

Maurice Martenot’s ondes Martenot, presented in Paris in 1928, offered a different model. A keyboard controlled pitch, while a separate ring and other hand gestures could modify timbre and volume. Its sounds had a hollow, penetrating character, often compared to a voice or an early string section. The theremin seemed to make electronic music disappear into the movement of the body; the ondes Martenot retained a visible performance mechanism while expanding the expressive range of a single oscillator.

Taken together, these instruments make several predictions audible. A sound source could be detached from strings, air columns and membranes. Timbre could become something a performer shaped in real time. An instrument might respond continuously rather than through discrete notes, and electronics could imitate qualities associated with the human voice while doing things no voice could do. Their limits are equally important. They offered few independent timbres, unstable tuning and little control over complex rhythms, while live electronic performance demanded unusual concentration from the player.

Radio turns the room into an instrument

Radio supplied the most important social setting for the period’s experiments. A broadcast was not simply a concert delivered to distant listeners; the studio itself could become a compositional space. Microphones could be moved, mixed, faded and balanced. Test oscillators produced pure tones, while engineers and adventurous producers explored static, interference and signal distortion. Music could also cross national borders with unprecedented ease, allowing listeners separated by thousands of kilometres to hear the same performance at nearly the same time.

Australia entered this transformation with striking speed. 2UE in Sydney and 3AR in Melbourne began regular broadcasts in 1923, followed by 4BC in Brisbane in 1924, 5AD in Adelaide in 1924 and 6WF in Perth in 1925, stations that later became part of the ABC’s lineage. Radio sets were expensive at first, so many Australians encountered new sounds through hotels, theatres, public halls and communal receivers before sets became ordinary household fixtures. Australian newspapers and wireless magazines then spread reports of electrical recording, amplified instruments and novelty performances from overseas.

For listeners, the wireless promised access to music that private ownership of an orchestra could never provide. A theremin demonstration in New York or Paris could be discussed around Australian dinner tables, while dance-band arrangements and studio effects could be heard in suburban homes. The same appetite for unusual sound survives in specialist retail, with an experimental record catalogue offering a contemporary counterpoint to newspaper demonstrations and broadcast experiments.

Recording changes what a composer can leave behind

Recording supplied another crucial route into the future. Before electrical recording, a performance was often lost as soon as it ended. A disc fixed one interpretation for later playback, and electrical recording captured a broader range of volume and frequency than earlier acoustic methods. In principle, a composer could also exploit the recorded object itself: its repetitions, surface noise, abrupt transitions and the physical behaviour of the playback machine.

Cinema intensified the sense that sound could be manufactured and detached from visible causes. The Vitaphone system and the famous talking pictures of 1926–27 placed orchestral effects, mechanical noises and popular music against moving images. Audiences learned to hear the clatter of a vehicle, the rush of wind or the density of an unseen crowd as dramatic material. Although these sounds were assembled through mechanical and optical means rather than digital synthesis, they expanded the composer’s imagined palette and encouraged the idea of sound as designed material.

In Australia, dance halls and wireless audiences were already absorbing the fast rhythms and bright tone colours associated with jazz and contemporary dance music. New recordings allowed local dance bands to study arrangements that might previously have required access to overseas performances. Broadcasts then carried those influences beyond capital-city venues. This circulation matters because electronic music did not emerge in isolation from popular music: the demand for volume, novelty, rhythm and repeatable effects came from contemporary popular culture as much as from the laboratory.

How accurate were the early predictions

The early predictions were accurate about possibility and inaccurate about convenience. Futurists correctly sensed that machines could become musical instruments and that urban noise would become valuable compositional material. Theremin and ondes demonstrations showed that pitch and timbre could be varied electronically without traditional acoustic mechanisms. Wireless broadcasters understood that electronic sound could create communities larger than concert halls, while recording engineers demonstrated that sound could be preserved with a new realism.

The predictions were less successful at anticipating how electronic music would actually be organised. Stability, memory, timing, layering and the storage of sound remained severe problems. The theremin could glide impressively but could not play a fast, precisely repeated bass line. The ondes Martenot had a richer tone but still depended on a performer to manage every eventuality. Large-scale electronic compositions would need new systems of notation, studio technique and infrastructure, developments that became central after the Second World War.

They also underestimated the institutional and economic work required to turn an instrument into a durable practice. Circuits needed maintenance, performers needed unusual training, audiences needed guidance, and experimental concerts depended on presenters willing to take risks. The history of electronic music is therefore less a straight line towards the synthesiser than a series of experiments in which sound, technology and social conditions had to evolve together. The decade’s lasting achievement was to make the machine’s musical future imaginable.

Listening to the future from Australia

Australian listeners can use Broken-Music’s historic music catalogue to move between archival releases and contemporary experimental music across vinyl, CDs, cassettes, books and limited editions. This market operates differently from a mainstream record shop. Collectors often combine local record fairs, specialist distributors and online imports, paying close attention to postage, currency and small remaining stocks. For Melbourne and Sydney listeners in particular, the specialist dealer has become a bridge between scene history, private collecting and the international avant-garde.

Public collections also preserve the material side of this story. The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia and the National Library of Australia in Canberra hold recordings, broadcasts and documents that illuminate the wireless era, while the Powerhouse Collection in Sydney preserves instruments, discs and broadcasting equipment. State Library Victoria offers another route into Melbourne’s musical past. These collections reveal that “the future” once existed as newspaper copy, fragile discs, station notebooks and rare demonstrations rather than as an obvious line of technological inevitability.

Today, community radio, ABC Radio National and independent experimental scenes in Australian cities continue the period’s central practice: putting unusual sound into ordinary places. A concrete first step is to locate the 1930 Carnegie Hall recording of the theremin and play it beside an early ondes Martenot demonstration, noting how both instruments make electronic sound visible through the movement of a human performer.