Les Musiques Électroacoustiques: construction of a discipline

My hypothesis in this paper is that Hugh Davies redefined what electronic music was via his research and documentation work in the 1960s, and, that his definition of electronic music still holds true today (at least as far as electronic music in an academic context is concerned). My argument, in other words, is that Hugh Davies constructed the discipline of what is now known as electroacoustic music. Two questions are as follows. First of all, how did Davies go about constructing a discipline of electroacoustic music? To answer that question I examine Davies’s published and unpublished research work from 1961–1968. Second, to what extent was he successful? Or, to put it another way, to what extent has Davies’s definition of electronic music been accepted? To answer this second question I examine subsequent published literature and projects from 1968–2012 that have cited or been based on Davies’s work, and show how the structure of Davies’s model of electronic music is reflected in this subsequent work. This is a transcript of a presentation given at the 3rd International Conference ‘Music and Technologies,’ Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania, 15 November 2013.