Acoustic music

Acoustic music is music that solely or primarily uses instruments that produce sound through acoustic means, as opposed to electric or electronic means. The retronym "acoustic music" appeared after the advent of electric instruments, such as the electric guitar, electric violin, electric organ and synthesizer.

Performers of acoustic music often increase the volume of their output using electronic amplifiers. However, these amplification devices remain separate from the amplified instrument and reproduce its natural sound accurately. Often a microphone is placed in front of an acoustic instrument which is then wired up to an amplifier.

It has its origins in the folk music of the 1960s. Following the increasing popularity of the television show MTV Unplugged during the 1990s, acoustic (though in most cases still electrically amplified) performances by musicians (most notably grunge bands) who usually rely on electronic instruments became colloquially referred to as "unplugged" performances. The trend has also been dubbed as "acoustic rock" in some cases.

Electroacoustic music

Electroacoustic music originated in Western art music around the middle of the 20th century, following the incorporation of electric sound production into compositional practice. The initial developments in electroacoustic music composition to fixed media during the 20th century are associated with the activities of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales at the ORTF in Paris, the home of musique concrete, the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) studio in Cologne, where the focus was on the composition of elektronische Musik, and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York, where tape music, electronic music, and computer music were all explored. Practical electronic music instruments began to appear in the early 1900s, and "electronic sounds" were also produced using animation techniques by such artists as Norman McLaren.

Tape music

The work of Halim El-Dabh is perhaps the earliest example of tape music. El-Dabh's The Expression of Zaar, first presented in Cairo, Egypt, in 1944, was an early work using musique concrète–like techniques similar to those developed in Paris during the same period. El-Dabh would later become more famous for his work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where in 1959 he composed the influential piece Leiyla and the Poet (Holmes 2008, 153–54 & 157).