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domokun Ugh. This is my first topic here, I think.

Hokays, state your opinion on techno/dance/electronica music, and name your favorite song/s.

Mine:

Dragostea Din Tei is awesome. I like it. I dunno why. Dance music makes me wanna dance, even though I can't. whee

Music has to capture an emotion. Sometimes, electronic music captures it so well. I've been rather known to dabble in electronic music myself, though I have to say that I consider a lot of techno / dance is of such terrible quality, it is just rubbish. Much of the mainstream dance music requires little musical knowledge, and is instead just plagiarised straight from some much brighter composer. It would be ok if it actually became an original artwork in that process, and I'm not saying that it never happens, but it rarely happens- I've never seen it happen.

I like electronica every once in a while, especially trance where threads of sounds weave in and out from one another.

The classical music analog to techno type music are the Minimalist school or Glass, Reich, and Riley with some Adams thrown in. When I happened on the Minimalists, I appreciated where techno and trance came from.

O-ZONE = Pop. Not dance.

Think of dance as Armand Van Helden.

I love how some people just assume that music only comes out of instruments.

I myself are not a great fan of the stuff, but ther are certainly some songs that I can appreciate. With ease. It doesn't take that much effort to have respect for talent (when it's due, of course).

Perhaps the meaning of the word needs to be changed, then, since a computer can create many tones that can be munipulated digitally to be just as expressive as instrumental or vocal tones.

Sound is sound, no matter where it comes from.

I guess that makes the computer an instrument, then.

music isn't created by instruments, it is created by artists.

So, logically, if a person is playing a computer in a musical manner (using pitch, rhythm and melody to create an aesthetic or mood-provoking sound) then it's music.

Seriously, there is some stuff that is legitimately not music but is considered music and that is more deserving of your criticism than some synthesised songs.

What you're referring to, Harvested, is analog (or acoustic) music, which is essentially music created by pure instruments without any anacoustic means, such as electric amplifiers or synthesizers. So all the natural instruments fall under that category.

There are other means to create music, I believe. There is electric music which most of pop and rock is under, which basically music created by instruments assisted by electrical devices such as mixers, amplifiers, distortion pedals, and other things.

Concrete music is the music of mechanical means, such as tape splicing of recorded sound, though that art died quite a while ago since the advent of electronics.

Then there is the purely electronic music, which is music created by electronic devices alone. The first example of this was the Ondes Martenot and Theremin in the early 20th century, although at the time it was a novelty and not a primary mean. Once Moog and his synthesizers came along did the genre take off, and with PCs all sorts of things can be made.

There are some purely electronic music that really can be called music (depending on how you define it). Paul Lansky, for example, makes most of his compositions on computers manipulating nearly every aspect of sound from pitch, duration, attack, etc. to fine-tune his pieces to his desires. The "Idle Chatter" series are an example of such work.