It’s the 21st century and computers are taking over almost everything, as

they can make decisions and do things much faster than people. Of course,

music industry is not the exception, as people have been using technology

to express their musical ideas, tell stories and transmit emotions in

meaningful ways for decades. Many of today’s popular artists use

computers to record, produce and create compositions. Because of this, we

have all had an encounter with electronic music at some point, we’ve

enjoyed it at a party and some of us even listen to it on a regular basis,

whether it is to help us concentrate or be more energetic.

The beginnings of Electronic Music

Computer music and electronic music are not as young as we may think,

although the concept of it brings an idea of high and sophisticated

technology to mind.

The genre holds a deep and rich history through time, having its roots at the

middle of the 18th century, with electro-acoustic instrumentation, more

precisely the Denis d’or, which was a one-off keyboard instrument

developed in 1753 that had the ability to imitate the sounds of wind and

string instruments, and the Clavecin électrique, an instrument built in 1759

that used electricity to create musical sound aided by a static electrical

charge to vibrate metal bells. These instruments were constructed almost a

century before the phonautograph, the earliest known device for sound

recording, that, at the same time, ​was invented 20 years before Thomas

Edison invented the phonograph. The phonautograph recorded sound and

made sound waves visible on paper. Before that, sound had been invisible and temporary since the beginning of time.

Shortly afterward the phonograph, the idea of the phonautograph was adapted into a disc music player and the gramophone was born in 1887, along with vinyl records, which were a huge uproar in the early 19th century. The record was a disk, about twice the size of what we know today as a CD, and it would be placed on top of the gramophone. Then, a needle would be placed on top of it and move across the disk, creating sound vibrations that were amplified through a speaker.

Later, in 1930, the turntable was developed.

Turntables through time

The turntable has taken music into a whole new journey full of ups and

downs for over the last 60 years; it has been used as a musical instrument

since the 1940s and 1950s, when experimental composers began sampling

and creating music entirely produced by this device, allowing a new genre of

sound, artistic skill and culture emerge in the music history.

Nevertheless, its success was not that evident at the beginning, but it made

a huge progress in the 1970s. The emergence of a new music genre, hip hop,

allowed the use of turntables to become a modern art. People called ‘Disk

Jockeys’, also referred to as ‘DJs’ or turntablists, were performers and

musical artists who used the turntables to play multiple songs at parties and

concerts, manipulating the sound and creating original compositions.

For many hip hop connoisseurs, DJs Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and

Afrika Bambaataa are the ​predecessor​s of turntablism. Through practice

they ​acquire​d an ​astounding ability to find precise points in a song by

dropping the needle on a record and developed extremely high levels of

hand eye coordination.

Kool Herc is widely recognised for developing the ‘break-beat’, a technique

that extends the song’s climax indefinitely. Inspired by Herc, Bambaataa

expanded awareness of break-beat deejaying through his famous street

parties. Then, it was the Grand Wizard Theodore, an ​apprentice of

Grandmaster Flash, who created ‘scratching’, the sound made when the

record is rubbed back and forth.

Early DJs used scratches and break bats to go along rap and hip hop lyrics.

However, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the term ‘turntablism’ became a

concept, an event that marked a significant evolution in the role of the disk

jockey (DJ), which had been evolving for two decades.

During the 1990s, DJs began to manifest what they could really create as

artists and a range of new scratches were born, inventing more

sophisticated turntable techniques. DJs Spinbad, Cash Money and Jazzy Jeff

transformed turntablism by inventing the ‘Transformer scratch’. After that

came the Beat Juggling, which is perhaps the most important development

of the decade in terms of turntablism and electronic music, as it effectively

evolved manipulating and reinventing existing tracks to composing music.

The Art of Turntablism

Turntablism is described today as the art of manipulating and modifying an

original reproduced audio source, in order to create new music, sound

effects, mixes and other sounds and beats, using as the main musical

instrument the dish or turntable. This instrument is completed mainly with

the use of vinyl records and crossfader equipped DJ mixers, computers,

control interfaces, effect units, and other similar implements​.

In terms of DJ culture, turntablism is said to express and represent

creativity at its maximum splendor, since turntablists manage to not only

keep record samples in endless loops, but also to move the records with

their hand to cue the stylus to exact points on them, and touch or move the

platter to stop, slow down, speed up, spin backwards, or move back and

forth (also known as the “scratching” effect, a key part of hip hop music),

all while mixing, shifting and manipulating the sounds to suit the mood and

obtain the reaction they are looking for.

Still today, turntables and vinyl records are the basic equipment of DJs in

clubs and music festivals. It owes its popularity and probably salvation

mainly to hip hop culture, being ​one of the longest lasting technologies still

popular nowadays. No matter how many technologies attempt to replace it,

like the cassette tape, then the CD, then the MP3, DJs are still playing with

their vinyl tracks on their turntables, as records bring a particular type of

atmosphere which people find pleasing​.

A large number of turntablists around the world keep innovating to

establish their own signature styles, with artists rediscovering themselves

to be the fastest, most creative players of their instrument.

Turntablism continues to evolve, and electronic music is still considered

one of the achievements of the twentieth century in music history, as using

electronic media contributed tremendously to develop the possibilities of

making new, creative music and affected musical evolution in many

different ways.