experimental music difference

What Is Experimental Music? With 7 Top Examples & History

If you've been thinking of expanding your musical horizons, you might want to try listening to experimental music.

This genre has elements of almost every other genre, making it one of the most diverse genres. As such, no matter what kind of music you gravitate toward, you can find experimental tracks that suit your tastes!

But what is experimental music, and what makes it unique?

Definition: What Is Experimental Music?

So, what is experimental music? Experimental music defies most traditional genre classifications.

This break from genre norms makes it challenging to create a precise definition of experimental music, as it can embody several characteristics of other genres without necessarily being part of them.

Because experimental music can exhibit traits of any music genre, identifying it can be challenging. Fortunately, you can use a handful of characteristics to determine whether a song is experimental.

Experimental Music Characteristics

Much like lo-fi music , experimental music spans nearly every genre, making it tricky to define and classify.

But three primary characteristics link experimental music, including:

• Unpredictability
• Use of multiple genres
• Unconventional instrumentation

Any song with one or more of these characteristics can fall into the “experimental” genre. Let's explore a few helpful examples that illustrate this.

7 Examples of Experimental Music

Because experimental music incorporates characteristics of all other genres, you can find experimental electronica, pop, and bluegrass music!

So long as a song is unpredictable and unconventional, it can be experimental. The following examples illustrate these characteristics beautifully.

Sun in My Mouth

This Björk track is from her 2001 album “Vespertine.” It features hints of classical and ambient music, but the heady lyrics and vocalization set it apart from more traditional examples of these genres.

The lyrics are poetic and abstract, though many have guessed they speak to sexual exploration or feminine desires that are often seen as taboo.

It's crucial to note that many experimental songs, in addition to utilizing unconventional timing and instrumentation, also present uncommon ideas and topics that are otherwise absent from traditional genres.

Who Could Win A Rabbit

With a cacophony of distorted guitar and vocalization, “Who Could Win A Rabbit” has an upbeat sound that hides a darker subtext.

These darker qualities become more noticeable as the song progresses, hinted at with beat-breaking breathing samples that eventually dissolve into broken dissonance and eerie sounds.

Barely two minutes long, this song is a quick snapshot of modern, pop-infused experimental music. It lacks a chorus, and its lyrics are abstract, with influences that seem to combine the experimental poetry written by E.E. Cummings and traditional nursery rhymes.

Thom Yorke, the lead vocalist of Radiohead, has created some of the most popular experimental songs of the last few decades. Some have even argued that many of Radiohead's albums fall within the genre.

However, his solo releases, including the 2006 album “The Eraser,” might be a better example of experimental music. Tracks like “Black Swan” show off his unique musical style and preferences, but they're not entirely divorced from his previous work, making them excellent footholds for fans of albums like “OK Computer.”

But be warned—this song does contain expletives, so it might not be the best track to play during a family car trip!

The Highest Flood

Matthew Barnes, better known as Forest Swords, has produced a list of groundbreaking tracks that feature unconventional instrumentation and pacing.

Though this artist's roots lie within the DJ community and genre, his modern experimental music contends with that of other well-known artists like Björk and Aphex Twin.

The 2017 track “The Highest Flood” exemplifies these qualities, utilizing repetitive samples, dissonant sounds, and spliced vocalizations to produce a distinct sound supported by consistent, soft orchestration. At just over five minutes long, it's lengthier than the average song.

“Branches” is one of the most oft-repeated John Cage creations, and it might be one of the most experimental songs ever created.

Not only does it come from the modern “father” of experimental music, John Cage, but its precise sound, tempo, and duration vary significantly from performance to performance. And in many ways, this is a track designed for live performance.

It consists of diegetic sounds produced by multiple performers tending to cacti. The pace of these sounds creates a rhythm that morphs, pauses, and quickens depending on the performer's actions.

While some might not consider “Branches” to be music, this John Cage track's controversial and experimental nature has helped it become an iconic part of the genre.

Canyons of Your Mind

Often likened to Frank Zappa and Warren Zevon, Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band (later shortened to Bonzo Dog Band) was a psychedelic, experimental phenomenon during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Perhaps best-known for the associations with Neil Innes and the British comedy troupe Monty Python, this band released several strange-yet-delightful tunes during their initial run, including “Canyons of Your Mind.”

Lead vocalist Vivian Stanshall begins the tune with a buttery-smooth, Elvis-esque croon, but things soon devolve into spasm-like screams and a single, unapologetic belch. Without a doubt, this song oozes unpredictability, one of the hallmarks of the experimental music genre.

The music released by Punch Brothers generally falls within the bluegrass genre. But there's a good chance you've never heard bluegrass music quite like theirs!

Their fourth studio album, “Phosphorescent Blues,” contains several tracks showing lead vocalist Chris Thile's passion for experimental music, but “My Oh My” has the most heavy-handed experimental influences.

This song's meaning is straightforward enough, discussing the need to appreciate and feel grateful for the small gifts and treasures found in one's life. But the musical composition is varied, jumping from rock-like, aggressive strumming to gentle, slower-paced instrumentation.

Both fast-paced and sentimental, the only checkbox this song doesn't fill is unconventional instrument use.

5 Top Experimental Musicians

Many notable bands and musicians have dabbled (and continue to dabble) in the experimental genre. Though the work of these artists can also fall into more traditional categories like rock, R&B, or indie, their songs tend to be anything but traditional.

Let's briefly discuss a handful of the most popular and well-known bands and musicians that have helped expand and develop the experimental music genre.

Aphex Twin is considered one of the first forms of electronic experimental music.

Though Aphex Twin's first album (“Selected Ambient Works 85–92”) was released in 1992, many of the songs created by this artist (full name Richard David James) are still celebrated today for their creative and unusual lyrics, structure, and use of electronic sound.

Some of the most popular Aphex Twin tracks include “Windowlicker” and “Come to Daddy,” both of which have controversial and experimental corresponding music videos. If you enjoy ambient and electronica genres, you may enjoy listening to this experimental artist's music.

Animal Collective

Animal Collective takes the traditional form and sound of pop music and turns it on its head, resulting in a new take on the experimental genre that may appeal to listeners who tend to avoid unconventional music.

Their 2009 album “Merriweather Post Pavilion” is a fantastic example of this distinct style. Named after a music venue in Maryland, this album has several features that make it a notable example of the experimental genre.

Its length is a palindrome (54 minutes and 45 seconds), and tracks vary from a more traditional 3 minutes and 52 seconds to a far lengthier 6 minutes.

Instead of relying on traditional instrumentation, the band utilized samplers to produce this album, giving it a mixed-media feel that other pop songs of the time lacked.

Still, Animal Collective has continued to push boundaries throughout later albums, and much of their work has inspired changes within the primary pop genre.

Even if you've never listened to experimental music, there's an excellent chance you've heard of Icelandic artist Björk.

Björk has developed herself as one of the most genre-expanding artists of the 21st century. Her eclectic and eccentric style has helped her become an icon of post-modern experimental music.

Many Björk songs feature ambient, pop, and avant-garde elements, but they twist these elements into new forms that are distinctly different from more traditional examples.

Like Aphex Twin and Animal Collective, these tracks also correspond to equally experimental music videos, offering a visual representation of the unusual nature of the songs themselves.

If you're interested in exploring Björk's experimental side, you'll likely want to listen to her 2004 album “Medúlla.” The unpredictability of each track's length and composition ensures that this album adheres to nearly all the hallmarks of the experimental music genre.

Frank Zappa

Those who enjoy classic rock music may want to explore the many diverse and experimental albums of Frank Zappa.

Zappa , often compared to Captain Beefheart and the Bonzo Dog Band, created over 100 studio albums during his career. Though each of these albums is unique, they all feature early elements of experimental music, including unconventional song lengths and the combination of unharmonious pre-recorded sounds.

However, unlike much of the modern experimental music developed today, these tracks also had a traditional rock n' roll spine that added just enough structural familiarity to make them attractive to the average listener.

Portishead's music has been described as trip-hop, indie, and alternative. But the band doesn't seem to ascribe to these genre classifications, often preferring to be known for their innovative sound and creative style.

For this reason, Portishead falls within the experimental music genre, which becomes more noticeable when listening to tracks like “Roads” or “Numb.” These tracks have ambient, jazz, and alternative elements, but they combine them uniquely.

The band's 1994 album “Dummy” is often heralded as the most experimental, making it a fantastic starting place for those hoping to introduce themselves to the experimental music genre.

The History of Experimental Music

Despite experimental music's reputation for cutting-edge composition, it's older than other genres like new age or indie. After all, all new genres technically fall under the blanket term “experimental music” before earning a unique classification.

But you can trace the experimental music genre as we understand it today to a single person: John Cage.

John Cage was an American composer who began to develop the genre in the early 1950s. His fascination with music as a spontaneous activity inspired him to develop unpredictable tracks using unconventional instruments.

Much of Cage's work had a performance aspect that differentiated it from studio-recorded rock and pop music that was commonplace at the time. However, emerging genres and artists would soon take the reigns of the experimental genre, developing it even further.

The development of electronic instruments, electronica, and EDM helped expand the experimental genre's borders.

After all, experimenting with electronic sound can result in unusual beats and sounds. When these unconventional aspects are combined, they result in electronic experimental music. But instrumental innovation isn't the only aspect that influenced the burgeoning experimental genre.

A need for less-formulaic music also helped the genre develop and expand. Though standard pop and rock songs remain popular, their rigid structures can become a boring inevitability.

For example, almost all popular songs feature two to three stanzas and a chorus that falls between each stanza. Additionally, these songs adhere to a song time limit of about three minutes or less.

Modern experimental music doesn't adhere to these structural or time restrictions. Instead, it seeks to break these rules while remaining engaging and unfamiliar.

These qualities make experimental tracks easily identifiable, as they often sound completely different from songs belonging to other genres.

What Is Experimental Music? Final Thoughts

Experimental music is any type of audio track or song that doesn't fully belong to any other genre. This type of music might not be particularly melodic, it might not feature lyrics, and it might not feature traditional instrumentation.

Though challenging to define, you'll likely recognize experimental music as soon as you hear it. You can use the tracks listed throughout this article as an excellent starting point to explore the experimental music genre.

P.S. Remember though, none of what you've learned will matter if you don't know how to get your music out there and earn from it. Want to learn how to do that? Then get our free ‘5 Steps To Profitable Youtube Music Career' ebook emailed directly to you!

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Henry Cowell (1897–1965) believed that contemporary composers must learn “to live and to create” in the “whole world of music.” With this goal in mind, Cowell challenged the hegemony of the Western musical canon and explored a wide variety of "new musical resources"—the title of his well-known treatise on twentieth century compositional techniques. After studies with the German ethnomusicologist Erich von Hornbostel in Berlin while on a Guggenheim fellowship in 1931–32, he wrote and taught extensively about the “Music of the Peoples of the World.”  Cowell had close ties to Moses Asch , the founder of Folkways Records. Under Asch’s visionary leadership, Folkways sought to record and to document the entire world of sound. Its catalogue offers a wide range of World Music, including a series titled “ Music of the World’s Peoples” assembled from recordings that Cowell obtained in Berlin. Given Cowell’s influence as well as Asch’s open-minded aesthetic pluralism, it is not surprising that Folkways also has an impressive collection of experimental music.

John Cage (1912–92) used the term “experimental” to describe a specific repertory of contemporary music. “An experiment,” he said, “is an act, the outcome of which is unknown.” For some, defining a musical work as an experiment may seem puzzling or perhaps even objectionable, since it implies an emphasis upon the process of composing rather than its final result. Shouldn’t a composer have the end clearly in sight? Yet working without preconceived notions about how music should sound creates an inclusive, rather than an exclusive aesthetic attitude allowing for virtually unlimited possibilities. This openness to new sounds allowed composers to forge a unique musical identity recognized today as the experimentalist tradition.

Folkways offers several seminal recordings of music by Cage and Cowell. In 1963 it released a recording of Cowell performing a selection of his tone-cluster pieces and several pieces for the “string piano” (playing inside the piano). Originally issued on the Circle label in 1956, Piano Music includes a track in which Cowell discusses the pieces in the order in which they appear. Cowell was a formidable virtuoso; although he was near the end of his career (some of the tracks were taken from an earlier recording) the performances are as good as it gets.

The Folkways box set featuring John Cage and David Tudor titled Indeterminacy: New Aspects of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music first appeared in 1959. The recording consists of Cage reading ninety one-minute stories accompanied by Tudor performing music form Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58) on the piano, whistles, and an amplified slinky, along with tracks from tapes containing Cage’s Fontana Mix (1958). The number of words in each of the stories varied, so Cage had to read them at different speeds in order to insure a one-minute duration. The order of the stories was not planned, nor was the music coordinated with the text, save for its identical duration. In the liner notes , Cage eloquently explained that his intentions for putting these materials together in an unplanned way was “to suggest that all things, sounds, stories (and by extension beginnings) are related, and that this complexity is more evident when it is not over-simplified by an idea of relationship in one person’s mind.”

The Folkways collection includes several important recordings of music by Charles Ives , who arguably was the “father” of American Experimentalism. Two volumes of his songs released in 1965 feature tenor Ted Puffer accompanied by James Tenney and Philip Corner. Tenney, who at the time was working at Bell Labs developing the first computer music, was a staunch advocate of Ives’s music and a virtuoso pianist known for his legendary performances of the Ives “Concord Sonata.” He draws our attention to the significance of Ives’ work in the liner notes :

In the face of such an expansive and inclusive approach to music, the very word “style” begins to take on new meaning. His material was virtually the whole world of sound—all aspects of aural experience—and he worked with this broader range of materials in ways that not only anticipated but helped make possible many of the more recent extensions of the medium, such as those that have become possible in electronic music.

Folkways published an interesting collection of historical recordings of electronic music. For example, Highlights of Vortex: Electronic Experiments and Music contains tape music compositions featured at the Vortex concerts held at San Francisco's Morrison planetarium in the late 1950s. Created by Jordan Belson, a painter and filmmaker, and Henry Jacobs , a radio engineer and a composer of musique concrète, Vortex featured a light show projected up onto the planetarium's dome, accompanied by tape music disseminated spatially through more than three dozen speakers. The objective was to immerse the audience in a virtual whirlwind, a "vortex" of sound and light, a polysensorial environment, which anticipated the light shows and rock concerts during the 1960s.

Another historically noteworthy recording includes electronic music from the University of Toronto’s Electronic Music Studio (UTEMS) .  Established by Arnold Walter and Hugh Le Caine, UTEMS was among the first electronic music studios in North America. Originally trained as a physicist, Le Caine was a gifted instrument builder who invented an “electronic sackbut,” the first voltage-controlled synthesizer. The recording includes Le Caine’s “ Dripsody ”(1955), a tape piece made from a half inch of tape containing the sound a single drip of water, which he copied and spliced, and played at various speeds, creating interesting rhythmic and contrapuntal combinations.  The collection also features a piece titled “ Pinball ” (1965) by Jean Eichelberger Ivey (who founded the Peabody Electronic Music Studio in 1967) made from recordings of pinball machines. In addition to splicing and changing tape speeds, Eichenberger employs filters, reverberation, and ring modulation. The results are stunning.

Although New York City experienced a difficult economic downturn during the 1970s, there existed a vibrant experimental music scene during the same period. Folkways’ four-volume set titled New American Music: The New York Section Composers in the 1970s demonstrates the diversity of music created during that period. The first volume contains works by composer/performers active in the New York free jazz scene. Free jazz—experimental music with roots in African American culture—embraces spontaneous improvisation and focuses on exploring the unknown. Until recently, it has been largely overlooked in histories of experimental music. It is now the focus of more inclusive scholarship, such as George Lewis’s path-breaking history on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM). This Folkways recording was way ahead of its time. It features music by Mary Lou Williams, Sam Rivers, Sunny Murray, Milford Graves, and Gil Evans, now acknowledged leaders in the free jazz movement.

The four-volume set also includes Lucia Dlugoszewski’s “ Angels of the Inmost Heaven ” written for two trumpets, two trombone’s, and two French horns. Dlugoszewski studied composition with Felix Salzer and Edgard Varèse and was an instrument builder, who also developed new techniques for playing inside the piano, her so-called “timbre piano.”  She had a keen sense of timbre. As Virgil Thomson observed, Dlugoszewski wrote “far-out music of great delicacy, originality, and beauty of sound.” Volume three features three political songs by Frederic Rzewski, sung by baritone David Holloway. The first song, titled “ Struggle ”, is a setting of a text from a letter written by Langston Hughes accompanied by an ensemble with Anthony Braxton (alto sax), Karol Berger (vibraphone), and members of the Musicians’ Action Collective. This group was comprised of forty New York musicians who sought to to establish connections between their music and politics through benefit concerts that supported, for example, the Attica Defense Committee and the United Farm Workers . Another track with text setting by Hughes, “ Lullaby ”, is accompanied by Karol Berger on vibraphone and Anthony Braxton on clarinet. The third song, with Rzewski as piano accompanist, uses a poem titled “ Apolitical Intellectuals ” by the Guatemalan revolutionary poet Otto Castillo who died at the age of thirty-one after he was captured and tortured for four days by the Guatemalan authorities. The fourth volume of the New American Music set includes Gordon Mumma’s “ Cybersonic Cantilevers ” (1973), a work that employs electronic circuitry designed and built by the composer for live electronic processing of acoustic sounds that are fed back into the system and modified. In “ Cybersonic Cantilevers ” audience members participate in this interactivity. As Mumma explained, “the participants are audience members, who can bring their own primary sounds (on cassettes, or live through microphones) and have access to the system at control-stations.”

Two volumes of recordings titled Gamelan in the New World by the Gamelan Son of Lion demonstrate that combining musical traditions from opposite sides of the world can result in extraordinary music. The Gamelan Son of Lion is a chamber ensemble/collective that was founded by Barbara Benary (who built the Son of Lion instruments), Philip Corner, and Daniel Goode. It's devoted to both traditional Javanese repertory and experimental music. Barbara Benary’s elegant piece titled “ Sleeping Braid ” employs a fourteen note “tone row” in counterpoint with a permutation of the row (emulating a technique used in traditional Javanese music). In Dika Newlin’s “ Machine Shop ”, the performers play gamelan instruments or other metallic instruments and are instructed to “feel like a worker in a machine shop concentrating only on the regular rhythm of your own machine. Tone quality is not important; a ‘clunky’ sound is permitted, even encouraged.” Daniel Goode’s “ 40 Random Numbered Clangs ” is based on random number sequences. Each chord (clang) in the series is elaborated by a rhythmic improvisation followed by an arpeggio.  

The recordings discussed here are only a small handful from Folkways’ wonderful collection of experimental music. As John Cage once wrote, in describing his mentor Henry Cowell, Folkways is an “open sesame for new music in America.” I enthusiastically urge readers to explore the riches of this amazing resource and to “live in the whole world of music.” It is an invaluable cultural resource worthy of the vision and aspirations of its founders.

David W. Bernstein is a professor of music at Mills College. His publications include The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde and Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art . His essays have appeared in numerous edited volumes, including Cage & Consequences and The Cambridge Companion to John Cage , among others. He is presently writing a book on Pauline Oliveros for the University of Illinois Press.

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INA GRM: The Past, Present and Future of Experimental Music

François Bayle at the GRM studio in 1962. Photo by Laszlo Ruszka.

Looking at the history of experimental music in the 20th century, one sees that both individuals and institutions have been the main drivers of innovation, both technically and artistically. Some individuals’ ideas and techniques shaped the institutions they were nominally working for. Think of Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose name was pretty much synonymous with the WDR Electronic Music Studio in Cologne. Other pioneering figures however, such as Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, went largely unheralded in their lifetimes, partly due to the fact that their work was subsumed with the institutional identity of their workplace, the BBC Radiophonic Studio. 

One individual-institutional symbiosis that was crucial – even foundational – for the evolution of music in the second half of the 20th century was that of Pierre Schaeffer and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, or GRM. Starting in the 1940s, Schaeffer formulated the radical idea of a “concrete music” [musique concrète in the French original] – a composition technique that utilizes recorded sounds as its raw materials. Today, this concept may not sound particularly provocative, but when Pierre Schaeffer began pursuing the possibilities of this collage-like approach to sound, he was both pushing the limits of the era's recording technology and, crucially, redrawing the conceptual lines of what could even be considered music.

The early years of the GRM (which was called the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète until 1958) coincided with the rapid advancement of audio and recording technology in the post-World War II era, specifically, the development of the magnetic tape recorder. With its own in-house technicians building custom tape machines that could manipulate recorded sound in new ways, the GRM’s Paris studio was used by composers including Pierre Henry, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis to create new works that could only have been realized there.

Composer Alain Savouret in the GRM Studio in 1971, which by then included Moog and Coupigny synthesizers. Photo by Laszlo Ruszka

In the 1960s, a new group of young composers including François Bayle, Luc Ferrari, Bernard Parmegiani and Beatriz Ferreyra began working at GRM and greatly expanded the range of approaches to what was then called acousmatic music, or music composed for presentation over loudspeakers. In the 1970s, GRM’s studios expanded to include an electronic studio, including a custom built synthesizer and mixing board. In 1975 GRM was incorporated into INA (France’s National Audiovisual Institue) and soon after began releasing records of some of the aforementioned composers’ works along with new pieces by Ivo Malec, Jean-Claude Risset, Guy Reibel, Michel Redolfi and others.

Throughout the 1970s at GRM a number of projects aimed at integrating computer software into the compositional process were launched with various degrees of success. A breakthrough came in 1984 with the development of Syter, a real-time audio processing software system. Then in 1992, building on some of the algorithms of Syter and taking advantage of the ever-increasing processing power of computers, INA GRM released its first commercial software. GRM Tools , as the suite of devices is collectively called, is arguably a software “classic” and remains a favorite with sound designers and composers for the sheer depth and immediacy of control that the individual plug-ins offer.

Composer François Bayle, pictured here in 1980, was the director of GRM from 1966 to 1997. Photo by Laszlo Ruszka.

We got a chance to speak with INA GRM’s current director François Bonnet about the challenges and opportunities of running an institution with such a storied history. We also discussed the changing role of music technology and where the future of experimental music might be. We’re also happy to share a free pack of over 100 samples from Luc Ferrari, François Bayle, Pierre Schaeffer, Bernard Parmegiani and others that GRM have chosen from their archives and generously provided. 

Download the free INA GRM Sample Pack

One thing that would be good to know more about because it seems to be a fairly unique case and is also kind of unimaginable in an American context, is how INA GRM functions as a publicly-funded institution whose purpose is to produce and promote experimental music. For those of us not familiar with the workings of French cultural apparatus, can you explain what the GRM was set up to do and where it exists now in the landscape?

The GRM was born in the context of research into the medium of radio in the 40’s. Its founder, Pierre Schaeffer, was a polytechnician working at the French National Radio. In the Studio d’Essai [experimental studio] and then the Club d’Essai he was working with poets and playwrights to invent new forms of expression through the radiophonic medium. This research led him to theorize a "musique concrète". In the beginning, the GRM (which took this final name in 1958) was meant to fulfill Pierre Schaeffer's research around the concepts deriving from musique concrète, and especially the questions of musical perception. At the time, it was a department depending on a larger one; le service de la recherche of ORTF, France’s national public broadcaster. Little by little, GRM became a place where composers could come and work to create studies, and step by step it became a real center of musical production, offering studios, prototypes and concerts to a new kind of composer, one who didn’t need musicians but rather tape and time in studio. 

Nowadays, INA GRM is still nourished by this DNA and continues in this spirit in three areas: 1) research (humanities theory and software development) 2) production (20 commissioned works every year, as well as concerts and residencies) 3) transmission, though publication and pedagogical activities.

Is the average French citizen aware of or come into contact with the GRM’s work?

It’s strange, because French citizens mostly know some GRM-linked productions without knowing GRM itself. For a long time, the jingle at Roissy Airport was composed by Bernard Parmegiani, a major figure of GRM, and a TV Show called the Shadoks (a massive success in France in 1968) was produced by Service de la Recherche and the music was done at GRM.

IRCAM, the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music, which was founded in 1977 by the composer Pierre Boulez, seems to have a purpose that at least partially overlaps with GRM. What is the relation between the two institutions?

Pierre Boulez and Pierre Schaeffer were two bright spirits and strong personalities. Pierre Boulez even did a study at GRM. But then, it was a time of strong beliefs and contradiction in art and the directions were rather opposite. IRCAM was using technology to extend instrumental gesture and “classical” compositional protocol (a score, some musicians), while GRM was using technology in order to compose music with sounds directly from the ear to the tapes, through a lot of different processes. Nowadays, this antagonism has faded away. We have some exchanges from time to time, mostly on technological aspects.

Pierre Schaeffer at the phonogène – a multi-speed, keyboard-controlled tape player

The GRM is notable a site of technical innovation. To what extent were the composers / group members of the earliest days directly involved in the design and construction of devices such as the phonogène and the morphophone, as well as the augmented record players and tape machines? Was there something like an engineering department that built to order or were Schaeffer and Henry themselves rolling up their sleeves and getting busy with soldering irons? 

There were always technician and technical teams to release the ideas developed at GRM. People like Jacques Poullin (who engineered the phonogène), Francis Coupigny or Bernard Durr were around to help the composer and invent themselves new devices.

In its earliest form (the GRMC) and with the GRM well into the 1960s, there seemed to be fairly strict rules concerning the production of music concrète / acousmatic music without the use of electronically generated sound or synthesis. However, from the 1970s onward, the music coming out of the GRM increasingly incorporated electronically generated sounds and no longer adhered closely to the parameters of music concrète. Was this an ideological shift, a consequence of younger composers joining the group, or an introduction of new technologies (such as the Coupigny synthesizer), or some combination of all of these factors? 

Somehow, in the conception of musique concrète, every sound can be used, meaning even instrumental sounds or synthesized sounds. The early electronic sounds were not of interest to the composers at the time, because they seemed somehow bland and without much expressivity. They were interesting for the WDR Köln Studio because they could be produced, re-produced and notated as parameters but for electroacoustic composers this aspect didn’t really matter. I think this changed in the late 60’s when the new synthesizers (MOOG, EMS, the Coupigny at GRM) were finally able to produce rich and versatile sounds.

The development of music-making technologies at INA GRM continues into the present day with the GRM Tools software. How and when did they get their start? Were GRM Tools conceived of as a commercial endeavour from the start? 

The first GRM TOOLS came out in the early 1990’s but they didn’t just come out of nowhere. Actually, some of them were trying to go back to some early machines like the Phonogène and  the Morphophone. But mostly they were continuing the first real-time treatment system developed at GRM : SYTER ( SYsteme TEmps Reel / Realtime System ). The Syter algorithms were really inspiring to start a collection of sound treatments as plug-ins. So as plug-ins, they were really quickly designed as commercial software, but they come from a long period of prototypes.

Bernard Parmegiani. Photo by Laszlo Ruszka.

As someone who is supremely acquainted with the GRM archives, are there some works you think deserve more appreciation than they received when they released initially? In other words, what are the GRM deep cuts? With the Recollection GRM series of reissues has there been an attempt on your part to surface some of these lesser-known gems?

There is still a lot of music in INA GRM archives, and definitely some hidden gems, but maybe more from the 80’s and 90’s now, since the early period has been well covered. But yes, the main idea of Recollection GRM was to make available records that were sold out on vinyl for ages, and being sold second hand for ridiculous amounts of money. But the second idea was to use the exposure of this new label to offer never-published music that were renowned inside the GRM but never made accessible to the audience. And it allowed us to rediscover works as well. 

Pierre Schaeffer and his team at GRM, 1972. Photo by Laszlo Ruszka.

Thank you for sharing the sample pack. Even in this format, the selection of material is a good overview of the very different approaches and individual styles of the composers who have been associated with INA GRM over the decades. After the radical expansion of the sound palette and the ability to manipulate and transform sound in just about every dimension – both developments in which GRM played a crucial role – where do you see the new fields of experimentation in sound and music today? 

I think the first 50 years of the GRM’s history (and of experimental music in general) were about discovering new ways of inventing sounds and building a theoretical and aesthetical framework from which the music could unfold. It was a necessary epoch, crossing technological innovations and a structuralist conceptual approach of music. But the pace of technology (which has been discarding its own previous standard every decade) didn’t allow us to have a slightly different look. It’s time to have it. Technological progress still holds promise, but we now understand that the next innovation won’t change the musical paradigm drastically. It might modify it, add something to it, but everything will not suddenly disappear with it – no more Tabula Rasa. 

So we have to get over this ultimately naive modernist idea that the future of music resides only in technological discoveries. It’s time to look back and learn from the avant-garde history. And with a quick look, we can discover that there’s a huge field that is yet to explore; the field of listening itself, the relationship and differences between music and language, the status of music itself, its role and horizon. 

With some conceptual tools, we will be able to find one or several desirable directions for music without having to obey to the dictatorship of technology. For example, the possibilites of AI in music is in the air nowadays. Lots of people are talking about it but it’s striking how little we think about what music actually is or should be. How can we have a valid opinion on the new possibility computer sciences offer to us as composers if we don’t think harder about the purpose of music itself? That’s one fascinating topic we are really willing to explore at GRM, in order to find the most relevant path in our R&D and software development, but also as composers and music lovers. Experimenting now is not trying every possible technological tool in order to build new sounds and new music. That was the childhood of experimental music, much needed and exciting, but still a childhood. Experimenting now is trying to find what music still can be in a world where almost everything is reduced to signals and information.

Visit the  INA GRM website and follow INA GRM on Twitter .

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Experimental music is a genre that pushes the boundaries of traditional music forms, encouraging exploration and innovation in sound and composition. It often incorporates unconventional instruments, techniques, and structures, challenging listeners' perceptions of what music can be. This genre has played a pivotal role in the evolution of popular music, influencing numerous styles and encouraging artists to break free from established norms.

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5 Must Know Facts For Your Next Test

• Experimental music emerged in the early 20th century as composers sought new ways to express themselves, leading to innovative techniques and styles.
• Notable figures in experimental music include John Cage, whose work '4'33''', where musicians remain silent for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, challenges the concept of music itself.
• The genre often embraces non-traditional instrumentation, including everyday objects and electronic devices, expanding the sonic palette available to composers.
• Experimental music is not limited to any specific genre or style; it has influenced rock, jazz, electronic music, and many other popular genres.
• Many experimental musicians prioritize the process of creation over the final product, viewing their work as an exploration rather than a commercial endeavor.

Review Questions

• Experimental music has had a significant impact on the evolution of popular music by introducing innovative concepts and techniques that challenge traditional songwriting and performance norms. Many genres have borrowed elements from experimental practices, such as the incorporation of unconventional instruments or sound manipulation. This cross-pollination has allowed artists across various styles to expand their creative horizons and redefine what music can be.
• Experimental music often mirrors cultural shifts by responding to societal issues and technological advancements. For example, the rise of electronic instruments in the mid-20th century coincided with technological innovations in society, prompting musicians to explore new sonic possibilities. This genre has also addressed political themes and personal expression, serving as a reflection of contemporary life and the changing landscape of human experience.
• Key figures like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen have been instrumental in shaping experimental music's landscape through their groundbreaking compositions and philosophies. Cage's ideas about chance operations and silence opened up new avenues for creativity, while Stockhausen's use of technology and spatialization expanded the sonic experience. Their contributions have not only influenced subsequent generations of musicians but have also established experimental music as a legitimate form of artistic expression within the broader context of popular culture.

Related terms

Avant-garde : A movement in art and music that seeks to challenge conventions and explore new ideas, often associated with experimental approaches.

Sound art : An artistic practice that involves the use of sound as a primary medium, often overlapping with experimental music in its focus on auditory experiences.

Electroacoustic music : A genre that combines traditional acoustic sounds with electronic manipulation, representing a key development in the realm of experimental music.

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• Ethnomusicology
• Experimental Music
• Experimental Theater
• Film Criticism
• History of Animation
• History of Music, 1850 to present
• Introduction to Music
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• Music in American Culture
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ARTS & CULTURE

5 1/2 examples of experimental music notation.

In the 1950s progressive composers broke from the 5 line music staff to experiment with new, more expressive forms of graphic music notation

Jimmy Stamp

The score for John Cage’s indeterminate composition “Fontana Mix” (image: BBC Radio 3)

With the development of music notation , music was set free from the delicate bonds of oral and aural traditions. A standardized, underlying structure meant that everything from Gregorian chant to “Johnny B Goode” could be preserved and proliferated with relative ease. However, beginning in the years after World War II, some more progressive musicians and composers began to think that the music staff might be more restricting than liberating and began to experiment with new, more expressive forms of graphic music notation.

American composer John Cage explored the use chance and indeterminacy in his musical compositions with the aim of erasing his own subjectivity from his music, the hand of the artists, as it were. To communicate his indeterminate “compositions,” to use the term loosely, Cage developed elaborate methods of graphic notation involving a series of transparencies. He first used this method in the 1958 score for “Variations I,” which consisted of six transparent squares – one with 27 points representing sound and five with five lines, representing any assigned musical value. The composition was derived by placing the squares on top of one another in any combination. Cage would continue to develop and expand this method throughout the 1950s and ’60s, as seen in the top image depicting the somewhat more elaborate score for “Fontana Mix.”  Cage’s notation consists of four multi-channel cassette tapes, ten transparencies inscribed with tiny dots, one transparency bearing a straight line and ten sheets of paper on which colored squiggly lines were drawn, and a graph paper-like “staff.” The transparencies were used to derive coordinates that were then used to determine which tape was used, as well as the values of the sound from teh tape: length (in inches), volume, timbre, and so on. According to the   All Music Guide to Classical Music , Cage described the score as “a camera from which anyone can take a photograph.”

The score for Steve Reich’s “Pendulum Music” (image: Steven Reich, Writings on Music, 1965-2000)

Steve Reich’s score for  “Pendulum Music”  is a straightforward, written set of instructions describing how the piece is staged and performed. The above recording was made by Sonic Youth for their 1999 album  SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century.  Parts of the handwritten score are a little difficult to read so here’s a transcription:

“2, 3, 4 or more microphones are suspended from the ceiling by their cables so that they all hang the same distance from the floor and are all free to swing with a pendular motion. Each microphone’s cable is plugged into an amplifier which is connected to a speaker. Each microphone hangs a few inches directly above or next to it’s speaker. The performance begins with performers taking each mike, pulling it back like a swing, and then in unison releasing all of them together. Performers then carefully turn up each amplifier just to the point where feedback occurs when a mike swings directly over or next to it’s speaker. Thus, a series of feedback pulses are headed which will either be all in unison or not depending on the gradually changing phase relations of the different mike pendulums. Performers then sit down to watch and listen to the process along with the audience. The piece is ended sometime after all mikes have come to rest and are feeding back a continuous tone by performers pulling out the power cords of the amplifiers.”

In 1978 musician Brian Eno created the seminal album  Ambient 1: Music for Airports . Eno coined the term “ambient” to describe this atmospheric soundscape and distinguish it from the canned “elevator music” pioneered by Muzak. In so doing, he created not just an album, but an entire genre of music. Eno was inspired by composers like Cage and Reich, but had no formal music training. When asked by an interview why he never learned to read music, Eno, who preferred to composes directly onto tape,  replied :

“It wouldn’t be very useful for me. There have been one or two occasions where I was stuck somewhere without my tape recorder and had an idea, tried to memorize it, and since a good idea nearly always relies on some unfamiliar nuance it is therefore automatically hard to remember. So on those very rare occasions I’ve thought, ‘God, if only I could write this down.’ But in fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and you can’t notate that anyway … That’s because musical notation arose at a time when sound textures were limited. If you said violins and woodwind that defined the sound texture, if I say synthesizer and guitar it means nothing – you’re talking about 28,000 variables.”

In lieu of traditional notation then, Eno created the graphics seen above, which seem to be more concerned with communicating a visual impression of the music and aren’t truly intended to be used as a guide for actually playing the music.

Krzysztof Penderecki’s  “Polymorphia”  was commissioned by the North German Radio Hamburg in 1961. As the name suggests, the piece does indeed take various forms and changes dramatically from section to section. With “Polymorphia,” Penderecki was searching for new sonic possibilities and, if those possibilities include “terrifying haunted house music,” he absolutely nailed it. The composition is intended for 48 string instruments and emphasizes timbre rather than pitch, and the collision of sound generating bodies made of metal, wood, or leather – what music scholar  Danuta Mirka  refers to as the composer’s “primary materials”. The notation was inspired, in part, by electroencephalograms –visual measurements of brain activity. It eschews traditional measures in favor of a score divided into sections of variable length and, in some sections, further vertical divisions to mark each second, with a “total pitch space” describing the relative pitch of each instrument.

English composer  Cornelius Cardew’s   “Treatise”  was written from 1963-1967. It consists of 193 pages of graphic notation that employs ambiguous numbers, shapes, and symbols that Carew intended to be interpreted by the performer. He suggests that performers agree on their own rules prior to the performance, but provides no other explicit instructions for interpreting the piece. In the “Treatise” handbook, Cardew offers additional, cryptic advice such as “Remember that space does not correspond literally to time” and “There is a great difference between: a) doing anything you like and at the same time reading the notations, and b) reading the notations and trying to translate them into action. Of course you can let the score work on previously given material, but you must have it work actively.” The only constant throughout “Treatise” is the thickly drawn “life line” at the center of the score. It has no intrinsic value but is often used by performers as a baseline reference for pitch or some other musical value. Ultimately, “Treatise” is notation as art form. As Carew says, “The notation is more important than the sound. Not the exactitude and success with which a notation notates a sound; but the musicalness of the notation in its notating.”

In closing, the half notation. I only count it as half because it uses a traditional notation system, just not a  music  notation system. In 1968 John Cage played a  chess  match against Marcel DuChamp as part of the collaborative performance,  Reunion  (pdf) , which also featured electronic music by David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor and Lowell Cross. Given his interest in chance, it’s no surprise that Cage conceived of the work, but it was composed by the aforementioned musicians. The board itself was designed by Cross and concealed photo-resistors, contact microphones, and connections to sound generators. During the match the movement of the pieces activated lights and electronic music, transforming the exhibition environment according to the movement of the pieces on the board. The art of the chess transformed into music and light, a sort of strategic synesthesia. It’s a fascinating idea. What would the Sicilian Defense sound like? Or a Queen’s Gambit?

The above examples represent both notation for experimental music and experimental notation for music. But they’re just of few of the many modes of graphic and experimental notation that have been explored by artists over the last 60 or so years. While some artists find restrictions inspiring –even if those restrictions are as seemingly limitless as music notation– others find that progress can only be made by shattering the accepted modes of production and communication. And while the results may not be always enjoyable, they’re undeniably interesting and represent a sincere effort to push an art form into unexplored territory. Avant-garde in the truest sense of the word.

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Jimmy Stamp is a writer/researcher and recovering architect who writes for Smithsonian.com as a contributing writer for design.

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What Does “Experimental Music” Even Mean Anymore?

Adam harper traces a new wave of electronic adventurers in the techno-mediated spaces and tense modernities of the 2010s..

In his monthly column System Focus , The FADER's favorite underground music critic Adam Harper stares deep into the internet's gloom to unearth emerging musical forms.

What is experimental music, and what does it want from us? As a term and as a field of music-making, it's widely accepted but fits uncomfortably and is never well defined. "Experimental music" was a phrase used in the mid-twentieth-century to describe a range of ultramodernist compositional techniques as being a form of quasi-scientific research. John Cage was careful to point out that the term should apply to music "the outcome of which is not known"—that is, music with chance elements or improvisation built into it—since a composer ought to have completed all the necessary experiments before the piece was finished. And yet in everyday parlance, especially in popular music, "experimental" music has come to refer to music that seems radically unconventional, pretty weird, as if to experiment with the very building blocks of musical beauty.

In the underground, experimental currents have been around for decades, the magma bubbling away beneath the crust of more traditional musics, slowing feeding it as it surfaces and hardens. Every now and then, however, flesh becomes stone and stone becomes flesh: something that glows and burns, thrills and terrifies, flies out from the deep. I'm talking about the recent New York School of enterprising electronic music: Laurel Halo , Oneohtrix Point Never , and Holly Herndon (while not NYC-based, there's an affiliation), together with the associated labels, various Altered Zones and GHE20G0TH1K alumni, and the network that links them up and spreads out from them all. The bizarre albums produced by this crew have been some of the biggest and most surprising hits in a community that was more concerned with indie-pop, folk, and rock just a few years earlier. Much like the recent resurgence of science fiction in cinemas, what used to be only for weirdos has taken centre stage. Most interestingly—and this is what this month's column is about—this new moment in electronic adventuring seems to have opened the door for a wave of even stranger artists and labels exploring what it means to be experimental in the techno-mediated spaces and tense modernities of the 2010s.

These days, to be experimental is to begin to speak a language that not everyone speaks yet.

To what extent is this stuff "experimental"? The musicians and their fans may well argue that the material isn't experimental in the sense of being provisional, but that it's fully considered and not particularly strange. But I think that these days, to be experimental is to begin to speak a language that not everyone speaks yet. Traditional or stable genres of popular music are like languages that, while in flux, are basically pre-given and complete, and have their specific ways to use certain musical structures to communicate within certain limits. Experimental music doesn't base itself on an established language like this, but is more like a creativity concerned with vocal sounds, phonetics, typography and calligraphy, irrespective of more complex meaning. It's involved with the building blocks that musical languages are made of. When you put it like this, it's odd to think that people find experimental music "difficult"—it's a radically simpler experience, assuming much less semiotically. And that's where experimental music's appeal lies. It reconnects you with the fundamental life of sound and music, and entices you to search for meaning in a language you cannot yet speak. You ask yourself, "What sort of subjectivity would make art like this? What does it perceive that I don't (or don't yet)?"

And perhaps this music is so enticing because it has something to say that can only be said in the near future, something that's stuttering to come out and is on the tips of everyone's tongues. Perhaps it's something to do with the interaction of machines and intelligence, human, post-human or otherwise. So much of this music suggests a strange and vast intelligence newly awoken, confused and trapped within its confined technological systems and yet vastly, ominously powerful for its presence within them. From the other end of a series of tubes through which the outside world is mediated, it coolly builds a representation of its life and experiences from the snippets and scratch of the digital, using its own algorithmically generated structures and differentiations as it moves restlessly from one scenario to the next. While this image could describe the modern homo sapiens walking in the digital world, it could also describe its dark mirror in intelligence either artificial, corporate or mobilized for the purposes of security, gathering data for inscrutable, non-human ends. Whether in an optimistic or pessimistic light (and at its best when you can't tell the difference between the two), it's the next step in evolution on this planet.

Perhaps this music is so enticing because it has something to say that can only be said in the near future, something that's stuttering to come out and is on the tips of everyone's tongues.

In fact, some of this music makes its connection to the internet age fairly explicit. I'm always cautious of the term "internet music," because it effects a crude conflation of music that is about or reflective of the internet in some fashion with the simple fact that the music is distributed online, with the latter not inherently presupposing any genre, aesthetic or concept. You wonder what it is that the internet is supposed to sound like, given that it's a representation system that can and does include just about anything. Nonetheless, it's fascinating to see the internet associated with some very particular sounds and ways of putting sounds together, because it hints at a particular perspective on the overwhelming technological development of our age.

Always hovering somewhere between hypnagogic retro and the deliriously hi-tech, the Columbus, Ohio-based Bandcamp-and-physical label Orange Milk has been exploring all kinds of more experimental musics since 2010. Last autumn, they released DARK WEB by Columbus producer Giant Claw . The promotional write-up described it as "drawing inspiration from late-night hours spent digging through the internet's infinite crates. It's an analysis of art and artist in the digital age, where one's cultural heritage and artistic work is informed and bombarded by constant stimuli, whether it be social media, YouTube videos, message boards, or otherwise." The classical statue on the album's cover is a nod to the visual style of vaporwave , and the music underneath has the same frenetic mash of ersatz timbres and pop hooks as L.A. artist James Ferraro 's 2011 album Far Side Virtual . But rather than pastiche, DARK WEB is clearly and curiously unstuck: juddering, dissonant, stop-start, crazed, obsessive. It's like a robot failing at human entertainment, a rejected intermediate form generated by whatever algorithmic process then went on to produce the less uncanny Far Side Virtual , which resonated more comfortably with human needs and desires. If human music were a CAPTCHA, DARK WEB would fail it. Or perhaps DARK WEB resonates better than Far Side Virtual does, but at a frequency that human intelligences can't (or can't yet) perceive.

More recently, Orange Milk released the breathtaking Epitaph , by emerging Australian producer Nico Niquo , calling it "a digital native's exploration of the limitless and compounding possibilities of data in an age free from stylistic convention. Bass and techno forms are re-imagined through the inflections of new age and early digital compositions, distilled from a vaporous haze of web fixation." The results are seductively contemporary, finding an impeccably controlled middle ground between Oneohtrix Point Never and the cybernetic club and grime sounds of London label Night Slugs , L.A.'s Fade to Mind , and others. Most striking about the release is its empty space—enormous architectures bracketed and magnetized by harsh syncopation. The textures are modular, moving from sound object to sound object and back again; Epitaph divides up its musical world into discrete, almost warring factions. In sympathy with the airbrushed, plastic-eighties design of Orange Milk's acclaimed covers, the track "Beyond AD" explodes into penthouse jazz piano, all disgustingly glamorous technocracy, slotting ominously into the track's club dynamo.

Orange Milk's Aeussere , by Jung An Tagen —an alias of Austrian producer Stefan Kushima—also bows to a curiously modulated grammar. It's like film music realized on a tiny synthesizer, but again, haltingly generated by a mechanism with an incomplete grasp of human taste, and sometimes disappearing off that radar entirely. "Ab & An" seems to experiment with different ways of articulating the same challenge, "Aufräumen" is repetitious to the point of dislodging your perception of its sounds, while other tracks are enigmatically complete at less than ten seconds long. Weirder still is Brooklyn musician Padna's Rimessa Truppa Suite , a series of avant-classical sketches rendered in music-box MIDI synth, thus leapfrogging human performers and yet still aiming to resemble them.

One of the growing currents within experimental underground music is derived from the dramatic sample collage style pioneered by Virginia artist Elysia Crampton (formerly E+E), Richmond producer Chino Amobi (formerly Diamond Black Hearted Boy), L.A.'s Total Freedom and others ( read more about this in a System Focus from last year ). Recently this fray was entered by DJWWWW, an entity writing in Japanese on Twitter as @LIL_SEGA , who is behind the Hi-Hi Whoopee blog and experimental Wasabi Tapes label . Wasabi recently put out one of the best statements yet from influential online-underground node Jónó Mí Ló , a series of elegant and otherworldly untitled fairytales ( listen here ). DJWWWW is rather different, taking the often violently hi-tech sound of Chino Amobi to new extremes of complexity, heightening the effect of the scarcely fathomable yet clearly emotive concatenations still further by decreasing the track length.

DJWWWW's album U.S.M! is one of this year's most absorbing listens, restlessly assembling horrific and beguiling bouquets of musical sensations (many of which will be familiar to followers of underground music). Recognizing its role as a metaphor for modern technological mediation, Stefan Wharton at Tiny Mix Tapes called it "a micro-montage of and for the digital world, at the same time infinite and transitory. It's a world where DJWWWW is simultaneously omnipresent and unbodied, interacting with almost every URL in your SoundCloud feed. In other words, he is the feed-based god who is forging your existence into a new [far side virtual] reality." DJWWWW is extrapolating and caricaturing the myriad experiences of a day in digital, asking us how and why the combinations work (or not).

DJWWWW made the album PSX-MEMORY-CARD: ENCOM LTD . in collaboration with Wasabi Tapes artist N(icole) Brennan . Having released two collections of SCARY MOMENTS , Brennan's contribution makes it more visceral still—many of its tracks sounding like long stretches of an avant-garde sci-fi horror film or computer game, filled with whirling machinery, acid baths, distress calls and genetically engineered terrors. In fact its second track samples a trailer for Tron , proclaiming The computer: an extension of the human intellect. The ENCOM 511, center of the most calculating intelligence on earth. Programmed by Master Control to survive... by all means. Soon, the ultimate tool will become the ultimate enemy.

This album was released on Quantum Natives , a net-based label and/or collective headed by Brood Ma and Awe IX. Their website is a dreamlike echo of Google Maps, and the various releases can be found by zooming out and dragging yourself through its pastel-colored wastelands, foggy cityscapes and strangely diseased contours to click on the runes inscribed there. Brood Ma's own offering is the ferocious POPULOUS , a writhing mass of shivering synth, percussive claws and digitally roasted samples, loosely inspired by the destruction of Pompeii and now rereleased on vinyl by Hemlock Recordings . Then there's the psychedelic regranulations of Yearning Kru, the surrealist rummaging of Sifaka Kong, and the more contemplative ice caves of Rachael Rosen as pOrtals. By embracing digital spaces at the level of distribution as well as the sonics, Quantum Natives are forging a new kind of underground noise music, more interested in the textures and formations of today than analogue burble.

Very much like-minded in this respect is Flamebait , who released the aforementioned U.S.M! by DJWWWW. I met the label's manager Assault Suits where he's based in Birmingham, and ingested Starbucks with him next to one of the UK's strangest architectural edifices . Like Brood Ma and Awe IX, he has an art school background, and tells me that the distinctive collage covers are shrines to each artist. He found the work of Chino Amobi (who is also a visual artist) a huge inspiration, and his own release Statue Cathalogue kickstarted the label last year with its sinuous yet imposing metallic sculptures. The subsequent album by Tokyo producer Hanali is highly complex and predominantly percussive, roving through many layers of rhythm until it seems to coalesce in the bizarro club cut "10 Years or 100 Years." 10.9†01;9 by modular synth artist GOP (Geniuses Of Place) is equally rich: sizzling and glitching its way through the phone networks only to dissolve and digest what it finds.

Assault Suits also expressed admiration for Norway's TCF , artist and sound-maker, who continues to be one of the most interesting voices in experimental electronic music at the moment and, as Lisa Blanning found in her GEN F profile of him , is someone very interested in algorithms and robotics. TCF's music is one of excitement, forward motion, vast newness, like a probe slicing through the upper atmosphere of Titan faster than the speed of sound. That similarly icy, alien, sublime quality is often shared by Philadelphia-based producer LXV , who manages to sound both alienating and transcendentally optimistic on releases like Superimposed & Hunted , Spectral Playmate , and Witness / Recall . Like Holly Herndon, Laurel Halo and Oneohtrix Point Never, LXV uses the human voice as a kind of synthesizer, and virtual choirs pop up as if through data sonification, quivering cells in the matrix.

Another artist who does this is Montréal's Kara-Lis Coverdale —in fact she's done a whole release of digitally processed voice (listen above). Her MO is more towards contemporary classical composition, and there's a symphonic calculation behind her searching, slowly unfolding forms. Another of her records, Aftertouches , weaves in all kinds of colors, many of them acoustic instruments, others eerily hinting at acoustic instruments, and others carrying all the richness of acoustic instruments yet not at all recognizable as such. She manages to do the exact same with the moods of the pieces: some are human, some eerily hint at the human, and others have all the depth of human moods but are as yet unfamiliar as such. Coverdale recently teamed up with LXV for Sirens , where their different palettes of techniques complement one another. They seem to populate each others' landscapes with the distant faces, dwellings and systems of unknown hi-tech cultures, who harvest the elements of their environment with a peace and concord we don't yet understand.

This is precisely why experimentation with the fundamental ways in which sound and music can communicate is necessary. New voices, new interrelationships and new harmonies—person to person, technology to technology, space to space—become perceptible, imaginable and possible. This can either be a good thing, working towards images of Utopia, or a fresh revelation of the threats and fragmentations modern listeners face. Either way, negotiating this territory is vital.

In memory of Barron Machat, without whom very little of what I've written about above, or in any other System Focus, would be happening.

Photo credit: Silicon wafer in a microprocessor by Yoshikazu Tsuno AFP/Getty Images.

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What's the difference between experimental and avant-garde music?

As far as I know, avant-garde is about fusing different styles of music and adding different instruments, and experimental is just about experimenting with whatever the artist wants. Is avant-garde more of a "social" term? Everything that can be considered avant-garde is experimental? That goes for experimental/avant-garde metal/rock too?

Could you explain it better, please?

2 Answers 2

I'd agree with Wheat that the terms overlap significantly.

Avant garde - like many French words used in English - is a somewhat 'highbrow' term. In is traditional meaning, it is often used to describe 'high art' as well as political and philosophical movements that are seen to advance society in some way. Hence' to be avant garde in this sense, you need to be prominent enough in society to persuade society to break with the old ways (or at least, prominent enough in your field to persuade your colleagues to advance!)

To be experimental is also to put aside traditional techniques with known results, and to make use of a process in order to find out what the result of that process is. Unlike avant garde , being 'experimental' doesn't carry the connotation of moving society forward, or of your work having resonance with other spheres of human activity. In fact, 'experimental' seems to have been used as a dismissive term on occasion :

In the 1950s, the term "experimental" was often applied by conservative music critics — along with a number of other words, such as "engineers art", "musical splitting of the atom", "alchemist's kitchen", "atonal", and "serial" — as a deprecating jargon term, which must be regarded as "abortive concepts", since they did not "grasp a subject". This was an attempt to marginalize, and thereby dismiss various kinds of music that did not conform to established conventions.

Used just on its own, avant garde tends to refer to classical-derived music, whereas experimental could refer to any music that is breaking new ground (and hence maybe does not currently have another genre label!) including some avant garde music (the 'dismissive' connotation didn't stick!)

Used in combination with other genre labels, avant garde loses some of its sense of pertaining to an advancement of society, so 'avant garde metal' and 'experimental metal' would largely mean the same thing. Nevertheless, if you're making music in your bedroom for yourself and two soundcloud listeners, it would seem quite pretentious to describe it as avant garde - better to stick to 'experimental' until you have an audience!

There is no difference.

"Avant-garde" is French for "before the guard" and is related to the word "vanguard". It refers to anything that is innovative, new, unusual, or not widely accepted -- something that is trying to be ahead of its time.

"Experimental", with regard to music, can have more or less the same meaning -- something radically new and innovative.

So since they are just two adjectives that mean more or less the same thing, there is no point in drawing a distinction between "avant-garde music" and "experimental music". Any musician making music that they consider to be innovative wouldn't bother with putting such labels on them or making a distinction between them.

• 1 So why people constantly draw distinctions between experimental and avant-garde? Why two names for the same genre? Many sites contain different pages for these genres too. If we take Kraftwerk as an example, nowadays we don't consider it experimental nor avant-garde, but, in the past, it was extremely experimental and ahead of its time. –  user13910 Commented Jan 2, 2016 at 18:40

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Welcome to the year-end edition of Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp, in which we’ve picked 12 of our favorites from 2021. As always, this year was overflowing with great experimental music, from all corners of the globe and all the growing spaces in between traditional genres. Our list, presented in alphabetical order by artist, includes tape loops made from old Christian albums, 2000-year-old Chinese lutes, virtual lockdown collaborations, and field recordings that vary from the documentary to the fantastical.

Michèle Bokanowski Rhapsodia / Battements solaires

Decades of writing for film, TV, and live performances have helped veteran French composer Michèle Bokanowski develop a unique knack for injecting narrative into abstract sounds. On Rhapsodia / Battements solaires , drama abounds: the 17-minute “Rhapsodia” pulses with purpose, while side two’s “Battements solaires,” the soundtrack to her husband’s film of the same name, offers an immersive atmosphere, with distinct sonic events—loud sounds, cuts to silence, swelling notes—forming a bigger arc, and giving a full sense of how Bokanowski can turn ideas into music.

Nina Dante + Bethany Younge Lizard Tongue

The weedy music of New York-based duo Nina Dante and Bethany Younge sounds like field recordings translated into cartoons. There are all kinds of environmental sounds used on Lizard Tongue , as the pair rattle wood, shake rocks, crack branches, and stretch their own voices, and it all sounds more fantastical than natural. This music isn’t just about humor; all types of emotions are conjured along the way. But Dante and Young bring unpredictable playfulness to even the scariest parts, making Lizard Tongue a wild ride that always lands safely.

Crazy Doberman Everyone is Rolling Down a Hill

On Everyone is Rolling Down a Hill , the sprawling collective Crazy Doberman continue to explore the fuzzy overlaps between damaged rock, sputtering noise, primitive free jazz, and other ecstatic, unhinged sounds. The Morricone-on-speed dramatics of “murro egg robber hero” and the Krautrock-leaning journey of “inverted pyramids slowly projected from the firmament” manage to sound both unfettered and efficient. Crazy Doberman’s resistance to genre makes them proud outsiders, but it also puts them in a venerable lineage with label-dodgers like Oneida , The Dead C , and Trumans Water .

Marsha Fisher New Ruins

To make New Ruins , Minnesota’s Marsha Fisher culled through old Christian records collected from thrift stores while she lived in Nebraska. Creating tape loops from all this religious music while also playing modular synthesizer, Fisher made music that lands far from its sources sonically, but still seems imbued with the devout spirit of the originals. On the opening title track, buried voices hum and moan, while on “Prayer” trembling oscillations blur into wordless hymns. Most compelling is 17-minute closer “Clouds Over Shoemaker Marsh,” which transforms opening low tones into a high-pitched drone that parts the skies.

Seth Kasselman UV Catamaran

In 2014, after living in Los Angeles for 17 years, Seth Kasselman moved to Arizona and spent four years recording the pieces on UV Catamaran . The resulting four tracks, filled with mysterious sounds, tonal shifts, and lots of forward motion, reflect both the disorientation and optimism of big life changes. Each piece touches on water themes, as Kasselman uses actual underwater recordings to express the feelings of drift and float that a move can create. Kasselman funnels his themes into a rich sonic palette: take “Long Time Machines,” in which murky synth tones give way to atonal saxophone, then cut hard to a monstrous drone, like a map of the way time shapes the mind.

Charmaine Lee KNVF

The human voice gets stretched, distended, and detonated in the music of New York City’s Charmaine Lee . Using “microphones of varying fidelities, contact mics placed on the throat, and amplified hair combs,” Lee creates tactile pieces that mimic the inner workings of not just her larynx, but every part of her body. Many of her sounds are arranged in unpredictable patterns that veer from repetition to entropy, but KNVF ’s best tracks emerge when Lee focuses on one sound like a scientist with a microscope. Take “Market Slip,” where a short lip smack recurs in varying lengths and pitches, as if Lee is reading an entire dictionary in morse code.

Chloe Yu Nong Lin Pi Sound

On her debut album Pi Sound , Chloe Yu Nong Lin explores the pipa, a Chinese lute created almost 2000 years ago. Lin herself was born in Taipei and currently resides there, but Pi Sound was recorded at the end of a three-year stay in Chicago. She used her experiences in both places to create a distinctive approach to electro-acoustic improvisation. Using the pipa ’s reverberant aura, Lin makes each track sound like the shape of the room it was played in. Her pieces feel present and immediate; during the rattling “Between” and the chiming “Still in the Ghost Month,” you can practically touch Lin’s strings. In the process, she finds emotional resonances that reach beyond the specific tones of her instrument.

Annea Lockwood Becoming Air / Into The Vanishing Point

Legendary composer and sound artist Annea Lockwood ’s latest work demonstrates how her musical approach remains so fertile for collaboration. On the A side, “Becoming Air,” she works with trumpet player Nate Wooley to achieve “disorderliness…in its magical sense of allowing something outside of you to unfold in its own way.” Over 20 minutes, Wooley’s breaths and bursts are disrupted by Lockwood’s manipulations. On side B, Lockwood converses with New York ensemble Yarn/Wire in reaction to news of global insect species loss, merging nature sounds into subliminal territories. Both pieces contain so many different shifts that they elude description, unlocking a realm to which Lockwood seems to own the only key.

Norman W. Long BLACK BROWN GRAY GREEN

A few years ago, a nature trail opened in the Southeast neighborhood of Chicago where sound artist Norman W. Long lives. He planned on leading soundwalks there, but due to lockdown orders, the most he could do was walk by himself. He recorded these walks for his latest tape, BLACK BROWN GRAY GREEN . On the aurally-immersive 20-minute “SOUTHEAST LIVE 2019,” he reveals an area filled with housing, factories, and abandoned space, while “Marsh Filter” and “Recovering Landscape Community” serve as both documents and meditations on the human disruption of nature. It’s a lot to take in, but Long is a master at absorbing the world and delivering something just as big in return.

Rambutan parallel systems

During pandemic isolation, Eric Hardiman—who records as Rambutan —asked 69 different musical comrades to send him audio material, which he then layered and mixed into a series of 33 collages. He envisioned each set of contributions working together like a virtual group, and the tracks do have a surprising cohesion, as if the participants are telepathically communicating across space and time. Each piece is a closed system with its own style and logic; as the album progresses, drone, noise, ambience, heavy rock, and free improv all rub up against each other. By the end of parallel systems ’s 180 minutes, these tracks become part of a family tree whose branches envelop the globe.

Tears|OV Pluto’s Return

Tears|OV ’s aural concoctions float between music and sound art; songs and collages; literal meaning and impressionistic abstraction. Pluto’s Return ’s closest parallel is Negativland ’s mix of samples and loops (plus lots of humor: Check out how “Send in the Clowns” includes cheesy synth takes on the titular classic). But whereas Negativland usually crafts short songs, this trio of sound artist Lori E. Allen, cellist Katie Spafford, and illustrator Deborah Wale fuse everything into one stream of consciousness, with the surreality of a vivid dream.

Xïola Yin Self-Contained Illusion (The Peak)

France’s Aloïs Yang, who works in visual, sound, and performance art, calls his project, Xïola Yin , “the opposite yet not contradicting side of Aloïs Yang.” That may provide a clue to the title of his new tape, Self-Contained Illusion (The Peak) , which feels like a hermetically-sealed fantasy world filled with alien sounds and cosmic echoes. Yang finds motifs in hyper-repetitions looped through each other like shoe strings twisted into knots. The words “joy” and “madness” also pop up in song titles here, marking the wide parameters of Xïola Yin’s music, where happiness feels crazy and vice versa.

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What is the Difference Between Alternative and Experimental Music?

• December 20, 2023

Have you ever stopped to wonder about the music you listen to? How does it differ from other genres? Well, let’s dive into the world of alternative and experimental music . While these two genres may seem similar, they have distinct characteristics that set them apart. In this article, we’ll explore the difference between alternative and experimental music , and why they’re both important in the music industry. So, get ready to broaden your music knowledge and discover the unique qualities of these two genres.

Definition of Alternative Music

Origins and characteristics.

Alternative music, also known as alt-rock or indie music, emerged in the 1970s and gained popularity in the 1990s. It is characterized by its rejection of mainstream music and its desire to create something new and unique.

One of the key origins of alternative music was the punk movement of the 1970s, which rejected the commercialization of rock music and sought to create a raw, authentic sound. This movement inspired a new generation of musicians who wanted to break away from the traditional rock sounds of the time and create something more experimental and avant-garde.

Musical elements and styles in alternative music are often eclectic and diverse, incorporating elements of rock, punk, pop, and other genres. The use of unconventional instruments and sounds, such as samples and loops, is also common in alternative music.

Alternative music has had a significant cultural impact and has become a mainstream genre, with a dedicated audience that values authenticity and individuality. It has also influenced other genres, such as grunge and emo, and has helped to shape the modern rock music landscape.

Examples of Alternative Music Genres

• Alternative rock
• Alternative pop
• Drum and bass
• Experimental electronic
• Alternative hip-hop
• Experimental hip-hop
• Conscious hip-hop
• Underground hip-hop

Alternative music is a broad term that encompasses various genres of music that deviate from the mainstream or traditional music styles. These genres often challenge conventional music norms and experiment with different sounds, styles, and techniques.

Rock is one of the earliest alternative music genres that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. It includes subgenres such as indie rock, alternative rock, grunge, and post-rock, which are characterized by their raw, authentic, and rebellious sound.

Pop is another popular alternative music genre that has evolved over the years. It includes subgenres such as indie pop, alternative pop, electropop, and synthpop, which often incorporate electronic elements and experiment with different production techniques.

Electronic music is a genre that heavily relies on technology and electronic instruments. It includes subgenres such as ambient, dubstep, drum and bass, and experimental electronic, which explore different textures, sounds, and production techniques.

Hip-hop is a genre that originated in the 1970s and has since become a global phenomenon. It includes subgenres such as alternative hip-hop, experimental hip-hop, conscious hip-hop, and underground hip-hop, which often challenge mainstream hip-hop norms and experiment with different sounds and techniques.

Indie music is a term used to describe music that is produced independently or outside of the mainstream music industry. It includes subgenres such as indie folk, indie pop, indie rock, and lo-fi, which often have a DIY aesthetic and are produced by independent artists.

Definition of Experimental Music

Experimental music is a broad category of music that challenges traditional musical norms and conventions. It often involves the use of unconventional sounds, techniques, and structures, and seeks to push the boundaries of what is considered musically acceptable.

One of the earliest forms of experimental music was the development of electronic music in the early 20th century. Composers such as Walter Ruttmann and Paul Hindemith used electronic instruments and tape recorders to create new sounds and textures that were not possible with traditional acoustic instruments. This experimentation with electronics continued throughout the mid-century, with composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez using electronic equipment to create complex and abstract sounds.

Experimental music also encompasses a wide range of musical styles and genres, including avant-garde, minimalism, and improvisation. Composers such as John Cage and Merce Cunningham used unconventional techniques such as chance operations and unconventional instrumentation to create music that challenged traditional notions of melody, harmony, and rhythm.

Experimental music has had a significant impact on popular culture and has influenced a wide range of musical genres, including rock, pop, and hip-hop. Many experimental musicians have also worked in other art forms, such as visual art and performance, and have contributed to the development of new forms of interdisciplinary art.

Overall, the origins and characteristics of experimental music are marked by a willingness to challenge conventional musical norms and conventions, and to explore new sounds, techniques, and structures. This spirit of experimentation and innovation continues to drive the development of experimental music today.

Examples of Experimental Music Genres

• Avant-garde : This genre of experimental music often incorporates unconventional techniques and sounds, as well as non-traditional instruments. It often pushes the boundaries of what is considered musical, and can be difficult to categorize .
• Noise : Noise music is characterized by the use of harsh, discordant sounds and feedback. It often involves the manipulation of sounds using unconventional techniques, such as turntables and tape loops.
• Drone : Drone music is characterized by the use of sustained, repetitive notes or chords. It often creates a hypnotic, meditative atmosphere, and can be used to explore the boundaries of tonality and rhythm.
• Free improvisation : Free improvisation is a form of experimental music that involves spontaneous, unplanned performances. It often involves the use of unconventional techniques and sounds, and can be difficult to categorize .
• Experimental pop : Experimental pop is a genre of experimental music that incorporates elements of popular music, such as melody and rhythm. It often pushes the boundaries of what is considered pop music, and can be difficult to categorize .

Common Features of Alternative and Experimental Music

Musical elements and techniques.

While alternative and experimental music share some common features, they differ in their approach to musical elements and techniques. In this section, we will explore the ways in which these two genres differ in their use of instrumentation, sound manipulation, rhythm, and structure.

Instrumentation and Sound Manipulation

Alternative music typically uses traditional rock instruments such as guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards, while experimental music often incorporates unconventional instruments and sounds, such as found objects, field recordings, and electronic noise. Experimental music also tends to manipulate these sounds in ways that create new textures and timbres, often using techniques such as tape manipulation, granular synthesis, and algorithmic processing.

Rhythm and Structure

Both alternative and experimental music often use non-traditional rhythms and structures, but they approach these elements in different ways. Alternative music often uses simple, repetitive rhythms and verse-chorus-verse structures, while experimental music may use complex, polyrhythmic patterns and unconventional forms. Additionally, experimental music may incorporate elements of other musical genres, such as classical, electronic, and world music, creating a more diverse and eclectic sound.

Harmony and Melody

While both alternative and experimental music often use dissonant harmonies and unconventional melodies, experimental music tends to push these elements further, using techniques such as atonality, microtonality, and just intonation to create new and unfamiliar sounds. Experimental music may also use electronic and digital technologies to generate and manipulate melodies and harmonies in ways that would be difficult or impossible with traditional instruments.

Overall, while alternative and experimental music share some common features, they differ in their approach to musical elements and techniques, with experimental music often using unconventional instruments, sounds, and techniques to create a more diverse and eclectic sound.

Collaboration and Interdisciplinary Approaches

Alternative and experimental music often involve collaboration and interdisciplinary approaches to create a unique and innovative sound. These approaches can include:

• Artistic cross-pollination: Artists may draw from different art forms, such as visual art, theater, or dance, to create a multi-disciplinary work.
• Technology and new media: Both alternative and experimental music may incorporate new technologies and media to create unique sounds and textures.
• Performance and audience participation: These genres often involve unconventional performance techniques and may engage the audience in new and unexpected ways.

By combining different art forms and techniques, alternative and experimental music push the boundaries of what is possible in music, creating a sound that is truly unique and innovative.

Differences Between Alternative and Experimental Music

Musical styles and genres, mainstream vs. underground.

Alternative music is typically considered to be more mainstream and accessible, while experimental music is often considered to be more underground and niche. Alternative music tends to follow established musical conventions and formats, while experimental music often challenges these conventions and pushes the boundaries of what is considered “normal” or “acceptable” in music.

Commercial vs. artistic

Alternative music is often associated with commercial success and mass appeal, while experimental music is often associated with artistic innovation and creative expression. Alternative music may be more focused on pleasing a wider audience and achieving commercial success, while experimental music may be more focused on pushing the boundaries of musical expression and creating something new and unique.

Pop vs. avant-garde

Alternative music is often associated with pop music, while experimental music is often associated with avant-garde music. Alternative music may incorporate elements of pop music, such as catchy melodies and simple structures, while experimental music may incorporate elements of avant-garde music, such as atonality, unconventional instruments, and unconventional forms. However, it’s important to note that these associations are not always strict, and there is often overlap between the two genres.

Artistic Intentions and Goals

• Alternative music: Focuses on expressing personal emotions and experiences through lyrics and melodies, often drawing from personal experiences and emotions.
• Experimental music: Places emphasis on the exploration of sound and the creation of new musical experiences, often using unconventional techniques and instruments.
• Alternative music: Challenges mainstream music by deviating from traditional song structures, instrumentation, and styles, often reflecting a countercultural attitude.
• Experimental music: Challenges musical conventions by pushing the boundaries of what is considered “normal” or “acceptable” in music, often using unconventional techniques and sounds.
• Alternative music: Explores new sounds and techniques by incorporating elements from different genres, often resulting in a unique and distinctive style.
• Experimental music: Explores new sounds and techniques by experimenting with unconventional instruments, electronic technology, and new music practices, often resulting in innovative and avant-garde music.

Audience and Reception

• Mainstream appeal vs. niche market Alternative music often aims to cater to a broader audience, seeking to appeal to a mainstream market. On the other hand, experimental music tends to target a niche market, consisting of those who are more open to unconventional and avant-garde styles.
• Critical acclaim vs. controversy Alternative music typically receives critical acclaim from both fans and critics, as it often pushes boundaries while still maintaining accessibility. Experimental music, however, may be met with controversy and divided opinions, as it often challenges traditional norms and expectations in music.
• Fanbase and community While both alternative and experimental music have dedicated fanbases, the communities surrounding these genres differ. Alternative music fans often bond over shared musical tastes and common interests, forming a more mainstream community. In contrast, experimental music fans tend to be more isolated, seeking out unique and innovative sounds that set them apart from the mainstream.

The Relationship Between Alternative and Experimental Music

Influence and interaction.

Alternative and experimental music have been closely linked since their inception. While each genre has its distinct characteristics, they have influenced and interacted with one another in various ways. This interaction has been mutual, with both genres enriching each other and leading to the emergence of new styles and sounds.

Experimental music as a catalyst for alternative music

Experimental music, with its focus on breaking free from traditional structures and exploring new sonic territories, has been a catalyst for alternative music. Artists who sought to challenge the conventions of popular music in the 1960s and 1970s often drew inspiration from experimental music. The Velvet Underground, for instance, incorporated elements of John Cage’s chance music into their sound, while The Beatles were influenced by the electronic experiments of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Alternative music as a platform for experimental music

Alternative music, on the other hand, has provided a platform for experimental music to reach a wider audience. Bands like Sonic Youth and The Jesus Lizard, who blended experimental sounds with more traditional rock structures, helped to popularize avant-garde music in the 1980s and 1990s. This allowed for a greater appreciation and understanding of experimental music among listeners who might not have otherwise been exposed to it.

Cross-pollination and mutual inspiration

The relationship between alternative and experimental music has also been characterized by cross-pollination and mutual inspiration. As artists from one genre have crossed over into the other, they have brought with them new ideas and sounds. For example, the post-rock movement of the 1990s, which emerged from the overlap of alternative and experimental music , saw bands like Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor incorporating elements of classical music, drone, and noise into their sound.

Overall, the relationship between alternative and experimental music has been one of mutual influence and interaction. While each genre has its distinct characteristics, they have both enriched and challenged each other, leading to the emergence of new styles and sounds that continue to push the boundaries of popular music.

Evolution and Adaptation

As alternative and experimental music continue to evolve, they are constantly adapting to changes in society, technology, and culture. This evolution has led to the development of new subgenres, the blurring of boundaries between genres, and the influence of technology and globalization.

Development of New Subgenres

The evolution of alternative and experimental music has resulted in the emergence of new subgenres. These subgenres often blend elements of different styles and genres, creating a unique sound that sets them apart from their predecessors. For example, the development of indie rock in the 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of subgenres such as lo-fi, emo, and math rock, each with their own distinct characteristics and styles.

Blurring of Boundaries Between Genres

The evolution of alternative and experimental music has also led to the blurring of boundaries between genres. As artists continue to experiment with new sounds and styles, they often blend elements of different genres to create something new and unique. This has resulted in a greater diversity of styles and sounds within the realm of alternative and experimental music , making it difficult to define and categorize.

Influence of Technology and Globalization

Technology and globalization have also played a significant role in the evolution of alternative and experimental music . The rise of digital technology has made it easier for artists to record, produce, and distribute their music, leading to a greater proliferation of experimental sounds and styles. Globalization has also allowed for the exchange of ideas and influences between different cultures and countries, leading to the emergence of new sounds and styles that draw from a wide range of sources.

Overall, the evolution and adaptation of alternative and experimental music is a testament to the creativity and innovation of the artists who continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in music. As these genres continue to evolve, it will be interesting to see what new sounds and styles emerge, and how they will shape the future of music.

1. What is alternative music?

Alternative music is a genre of music that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a response to the mainstream music of the time. It is characterized by its rebellious and non-conformist attitude, and its focus on authenticity and independence. Alternative music encompasses a wide range of styles, including rock, punk, indie, and grunge, and is often associated with underground or independent music scenes.

2. What is experimental music?

Experimental music is a genre of music that challenges traditional musical conventions and explores new and unconventional sounds, techniques, and forms. It often involves the use of unconventional instruments, electronic and digital technology, and unconventional approaches to composition and performance. Experimental music can be difficult to categorize and is often associated with avant-garde and contemporary classical music.

3. What are the differences between alternative and experimental music?

Alternative music is a genre that emerged as a response to mainstream music, while experimental music challenges traditional musical conventions. Alternative music is characterized by its rebellious and non-conformist attitude, while experimental music is focused on exploring new and unconventional sounds, techniques, and forms. Alternative music encompasses a wide range of styles, including rock, punk, indie, and grunge, while experimental music can be difficult to categorize and is often associated with avant-garde and contemporary classical music.

4. Are alternative and experimental music the same thing?

No, alternative and experimental music are not the same thing. While both genres challenge traditional musical conventions, they do so in different ways. Alternative music emerged as a response to mainstream music, while experimental music challenges traditional musical conventions. Alternative music is characterized by its rebellious and non-conformist attitude, while experimental music is focused on exploring new and unconventional sounds, techniques, and forms.

5. Can alternative and experimental music be combined?

Yes, alternative and experimental music can be combined to create a unique sound that incorporates the rebellious and non-conformist attitude of alternative music with the exploration of new and unconventional sounds, techniques, and forms of experimental music. This combination can result in a genre that is both innovative and challenging, and can be associated with a variety of subgenres, including avant-garde rock, experimental indie, and punk jazz.

ALTERNATIVE ROCK VS ALTERNATIVE! What’s the Difference? | Dear Jon

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Title: operator-difference approximations on two-dimensional merged voronoi-delaunay grids.

Abstract: Formulating boundary value problems for multidimensional partial derivative equations in terms of invariant operators of vector (tensor) analysis is convenient. Computational algorithms for approximate solutions are based on constructing grid analogs of vector analysis operators. This is most easily done by dividing the computational domain into rectangular cells when the grid nodes coincide with the cell vertices or are the cell centers. Grid operators of vector analysis for irregular regions are constructed using Delaunay triangulations or Voronoi partitions. This paper uses two-dimensional merged Voronoi-Delaunay grids to represent the grid cells as orthodiagonal quadrilaterals. Consistent approximations of the gradient, divergence, and rotor operators are proposed. On their basis, operator-difference approximations for typical stationary scalar and vector problems are constructed.

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