The Sound of Tomorrow: How Electronic Music Was Smuggled into the Mainstream

Monterey pop festival, 1967. Bernie
Krause and Paul Beaver demonstrated a Moog synthesizer to the assembled rock
aristocracy, plugging into a surge of interest that would see synthesizers and
electronic sound become commonplace in rock and pop early the following decade.



And yet in 1967 electronic music had
already seeped into mainstream culture. 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.