Electronic music only became possible once music ceased to exist as a fixed language and linguistic metaphor, when composers began to invent and develop phonemes (in the sense already indicated by Debussy, for example) rather than manipulating ready-made, ready-to-use words; from the moment, therefore, when composers became aware that notes are not the materials of music, but only conventional signs behind which concrete phenomena are hidden, and that acting musically means organizing perception, not notes. It was then that the possibility and necessity of new electroacoustic means emerged, allowing musicians to effectively go beyond notes.
However, in an electronic music studio, the possibility given to musicians to invent an infinite variety of sound forms—including the imitation of existing sound forms through well-known synthesis processes—should not be conceived as a simple enrichment of what is called the timbral palette of vocabulary, but, in a certain sense, as a return to the origins, as a new taking possession of nature. For the first time, musicians had a vision of a continuum within which they could move by adjusting their pace to the nature of their chosen path rather than bowing to the law of a number of fixed references.
Luciano Berio, Discussion about “Experimental and Radical Music” (1961)
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