Live electronic music
![This Telharmonium console (likely pictured in the late 1890s) is an early electronic organ by Thaddeus Cahill, and one of the first electronic instruments used for live performance.](/Images/godic/202501/24/Telharmonium-01_cropped0219.png")
![Keith Rowe (pictured in 2008) improvising with prepared guitar at a music festival in Tokyo.](/Images/godic/202501/24/Rowe_Solo0219.jpg")
![Stockhausen (2 September 1972 at the Shiraz Arts Festival, at the sound controls for the live-electronic work Mantra), who wrote a number of notable electronic compositions in the 1960s and 1970s in which amplification, filtering, tape delay, and spatialization was added to live instrumental performance](/Images/godic/202501/24/Shiraz_390219.jpg")
![Farmers Manual 2002, performing laptronica](/Images/godic/202501/24/Farmers_Manual_20020219.jpg")
Live electronic music (also known as live electronics and electroacoustic improvisation) is any kind of music that can include the use of electroacoustic instruments, various electronic sound-generating devices, and computers, but which generally excludes the use of prerecorded or sampled material. Initially the practice developed in reaction to sound-based composition for fixed media such as musique concrète, electronic music and early computer music. Musical improvisation often plays a large role in the performance of this music. The timbres of various sounds may be transformed extensively using devices such as amplifiers, filters, ring modulators and other forms of circuitry (Sutherland 1994, 157). Widespread adoption of mobile computing has led to an increase in the use of computers in live electronics. Real-time generation and manipulation of audio using laptop computers is now commonplace. Electronic musicians often play partially pre-recorded music in Live PAs.