The Sound of Tomorrow

by Mark Brend

London, 1966: Paul McCartney met a group of three electronic musicians called Unit Delta Plus. McCartney was there because he had become fascinated by electronic music, and wanted to know how it was made. He was one of the first rock musicians to grasp its potential, but even he was notably late to the party. For years, composers and technicians had been making electronic music for film and Tv. Hitchcock had commissioned a theremin soundtrack for Spellbound (1945); The Forbidden Planet (1956) featured an entirely electronic score; Delia Derbyshire had created the Dr Who theme in 1963; and by the early 1960s, all you had to do was watch commercial Tv for a few hours to hear the weird and wonderful sounds of the new world. The Sound of Tomorrow tells the compelling story of the sonic adventurers who first introduced electronic music to the masses. A network of composers, producers, technicians and inventors, they took emerging technology and with it made sound and music that was bracingly new.

Genres: Music

288 pages, Paperback

First published September 27, 2012

Reviews

[Herb · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a LOT of interesting raw data here, especially about lesser-known performers and composers, but I was disappointed that the book was not better organized and/or copy-edited. There are too many times that the same events are described in different chapters without adding significantly to what had been written previously.

The writer clearly interviewed a lot of people who tried out various electronic gear, whether commercially manufactured or home-made, but there's not much evidence of critical thought. The book is too much of a list of events (that's not exactly chronologically or thematically structured) with little sense of which occurrences had influence on contemporaneous or later artists.

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read "The Sound of Tomorrow" while researching an iconic figure from the early days of electronic music, but it provided me with so much more and was a great read.