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

Monterey pop festival, 1967. BernieKrause and Paul Beaver demonstrated a Moog synthesizer to the assembled rockaristocracy, plugging into a surge of interest that would see synthesizers andelectronic sound become commonplace in rock and pop early the following decade.And yet in 1967 electronic music hadalready seeped into mainstream culture. For years, composers and technicianshad been making electronic music for film and TV. Hitchcock had commissioned atheremin soundtrack for Spellbound(1945); The Forbidden Planet (1956)featured an entirely electronic score; Delia Derbyshire had created the Dr Who theme in 1963; and by the early1960s, all you had to do was watch commercial TV for a few hours to hear theweird and wonderful sounds of the new world.TheSound of Tomorrow tells the compelling story of thesonic adventurers who first introduced electronic music to the masses. Anetwork of composers, producers, technicians and inventors, they took emergingtechnology and with it made sound and music that was bracingly new.