Atoms

Dubstep emerged from Croydon's social insularity where limited entertainment options concentrated creative youth into the same rooms

Dubstep is characterised by syncopated rhythms, prominent basslines, and a dark tone

Dubstep was born from producers who loved UK garage's antecedents but were disillusioned by its homogenization

Eno discovered ambient aesthetics accidentally when a quiet, single-channel record merged with room noise

Erik Satie's 'furniture music' designed music to blend into the environment rather than command attention

Estuary runs a subset of Tidal (Mini-Tidal) in the browser with no installation

Estuary's entire interface, tutorials and help texts are translated into multiple natural languages

Eurorack is the dominant modular format: 3U tall, 3.5 mm jacks, from a Doepfer standard

Eurorack modules are interconnected with 3.5 mm mono miniature jack patch cables

Fabio coined liquid funk in 1999 via a Creative Source compilation

Five terms — visual music, expanded cinema, live cinema, VJing, and live AV performance — divide the audiovisual-performance field

Footwork is a ~160 BPM Chicago dance genre of cut-up samples over syncopated drum patterns, evolved from ghetto house

Footwork is utilitarian music made to soundtrack competitive dance battles, not for passive listening

Footwork split off from Chicago Juke / Ghetto house in the mid-1990s as a local splinter scene

Form 696 let London police suppress Black music events through venue licensing rather than prosecution

Forward>> (FWD>>) was the founding London club night that incubated dubstep from 2001

Frankfurt's early 1980s electronic scene coined the word 'techno' before Berlin's scene existed

Frankfurt's early-90s scene, seeded by DJ Dag's trance-leaning sets, became the birthplace of the trance sound

Freesound is the largest Creative Commons audio repository, born as a research project at UPF Barcelona

Generative art is always a collaboration between the artist and the autonomous system

Generative art requires an autonomous system and a degree of unpredictability

Glicol is designed for zero-knowledge beginners but scales to expert live-coding

Goa trance began as DJs remixing Western electronic tracks into dancefloor mixes in 1980s Goa

Goa trance emerged from beach party DJ culture seeking to induce trance states through continuous music

Goa trance emerged in the early 1990s from Goa, India's underground hippie party scene, not from a record industry

Grime built an independent video and online platform ecosystem because mainstream media ignored the genre

Grime is a 140 BPM East London genre built on syncopated breakbeats, MC vocals, and jagged electronic sound

Grime is defined by 140 BPM and an aggressive street-realist aesthetic rather than by instrumentation or melody

Grime's early spread relied on pirate radio, dubplate culture, and a self-contained DIY ecosystem outside mainstream industry

GTA: Vice City (2002) helped turn attitudes toward the 1980s from parody to homage, seeding synthwave

Hardstyle bifurcated into euphoric and raw camps when part of the audience wanted a harder, darker sound

Hardstyle is an umbrella term for harder dance styles unified by a tough, dark reverse bass

House grew from Chicago's Black and gay underground clubs, where dance music survived after disco's fall

House music takes its name from Chicago's Warehouse club, where Frankie Knuckles was resident DJ

House music was born when disco went underground after the 1979 Disco Demolition Night

House music's defining property is its structural ability to continuously spawn new genres from its core elements

Hydra is a browser-based, JavaScript live-coding language for networked video-synth visuals

In algorave, musicians take responsibility for the music — not the software

In creative coding courses the objective is art, but the medium is student-written software

In live coding an error is material to work with, not a failure to hide

In live coding, programs are instruments that can change themselves — making the code itself a dynamic, performable medium

Isolationist ambient is a 1990s dark-ambient subgenre defined as music that deliberately 'pushes away' rather than comforts listeners

Jersey club emerged from Newark DJs self-pressing and selling club-track CDs in 2001

Jesse Saunders' 'On and On' (1984) is regarded as the first house record on vinyl

Jungle and drum & bass split by feel and drum treatment, not by tempo

Jungle was rooted in Black and working-class London communities who were actively excluded from mainstream clubs

Live cinema is the simultaneous real-time creation of sound and image by sonic and visual artists on equal terms

Live cinema's lineage runs from shadow theatre through magic lanterns, colour music, expanded cinema, and video art

Live coding frames computer programming itself as a creative cultural activity

Live coding is a community of practice, organised since c.2000 around TOPLAP

Live coding is improvisatory real-time composition where the writing of code itself is performed as a live event for an audience

Live coding is improvised real-time music-making, not DJing and not software engineering

Live coding performance projects the running code so the audience witnesses how the music is made

Live coding strips away GUIs to reveal the language underneath, treating the laptop as a language machine

Live coding treats algorithms as expressions of thought, not as tools — distinguishing it from tool-centric approaches to music technology

Live Coding: A User's Manual is published CC-BY-SA, enabling free use with attribution and share-alike — a license choice that itself reflects live coding's ethos

Live coding's defining conviction is that code is written and projected in front of the audience in real time

Live coding's online-performance culture long predates the 2020 pandemic

Melodic techno pairs hypnotic techno drive with harmonic melody and cinematic atmosphere

Microhouse is best described as 'housey minimal techno' rather than 'house with techno elements'