The 20th century has seen the vastest evolution of music styles and instruments, most of which have been heavily influenced by the electronic and digital mediums.

Since the early 1920's many electronic renditions of acoustic instruments have become widely popular and available to the average musician. Instruments varying from electric guitars and basses, electronic pianos, synthesized drums and the ever popular "drum machines" and bass synthesizers including instruments that in themselves can create synthesis of multiple acoustic instruments and sounds by recreating the waveform (or shape of the sound waves) produced by playing them.

Electronics has not only offered a means to alter the sounds of already existing instruments, but also as a way to generate new sounds, effects, tones and timbres that would never be possible to be produced in a natural setting.

In the years following the first electronic instruments and synthesizers was what was called the "Dig

The third stage of electronic music's life, a stage that continues to grow even today as new technology is developed all the time, involves the use of the computer as a sound generator. The basic idea of computer music is the fact that the shape of any sound wave can be written on a graph, and this graph can in turn be described by a series of numbers (coordinates), each of which can represent a point on the graph. A series of numbers on the graph can be translated by a device known as a digital-to-analogue converter into a sound tape that can be played back on a tape recorder, or stored digitally on the computer's hard-disk. As composers obviously do not think in terms of the shape of sound waves, computer programs were written that could translate musical specifics, including pitches, durations, and dynamics into the numbers on the graph representing the shape of the sound (waveform). Computer sound-generation is the most flexible of all these electronic mediums.

By the late 20's the Theremin had been implemented in the works of many classical compositions and concert music. It's invention as the first "electronic" musical instrument inspired a whole new field of instrumentation, including the Ondes Martenot, the electric organ, and finally the synthesizers we use today. This invention discovered by complete mistake may have been the driving force or inspirational mechanism behind today's synthesizers. Perhaps it was ahead of its time, but a wide array of modern electronic sounds and devices can be accredited to this revolutionary invention by mistake.

Performers and composers soon learned to appreciate the strengths of various instruments made by different companies. For example, the string sounds made by one model of a synthesizer might be extremely impressive, while the filter effects of another might be appealing. A filter effect was when an electrical signal was sent through a series of transforming devices within the synthesizer, to add effects such as noise, distortion, or echoes. Seeming as though early synthesizers did not produce sounds as rich as those made by natural instruments, some of these musicians developed a technique of playing two or more synthesizers simultaneously to overlap or fatten the available sound. It became quite common for musician to have several types of synthesizers available to meet his musical requirements as effectively as possible.

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