This 2012 book, subtitled "How Electronic Music Was Smuggled Into The Mainstream", gives a wonderfully detailed reading of how early electronic "music" (be it sound effects, movie sound design and sountracks, TV commercials, children's music, etc.) insinuated itself into our collective consciousness without fanfare. It is also the story of brave individuals who experimented with a fledgling technology and took it to both ridiculous and the sublime places. This book concentrates on a kind of populist netherworld bypassed by the "serious" or "academic" composers (like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, and Otto Luening) of the time, where sound was produced and manipulated with both commercial and artistic intentions. Many were "do-it-yourself" musicians, inventors, and experimenters whose need to express themselves superseded contemporaneous artistic ideas and acceptable music technology. Discoveries abound here.
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