Pamela Kenney, age 15, of Lynn, Mass., for her question:

CAN YOU EXPLAIN ELECTRONIC MUSIC?

Electronic music is music that requires the use of electronic devices to produce or manipulate sound during its composition and performance. The electronic sound is usually produced entirely through electrical means, as by an electronic sound synthesizer, a complex system of generators that can originate and control sound.

Sounds may also be produced by nonelectric means and then altered and combined by electronic devices such as a tape recorder.

The essential feature of electronic music is that electronic devices are necessary in the compositional process. Electronic music is thus distinguishable from music composed in the traditional manner but played on an electronic instrument, such as an electric organ or electric guitar, or from music transferred to an electronic medium, such as a phonograph or a radio.

The first significant electronic music was created in 19413 in Paris, where a group of engineers and composers recorded sounds from everyday life on magnetic tape and patched them together in various ways, sometimes purposely distorting the original sounds in the process.

Compositions that were produced in this manner were called "musique concrete," or in the French translation, "concrete music." This name was used because it uses actual, or concrete, sounds from the real world as opposed to artificial, or abstract, sounds produced by musical instruments.

Sound synthesizers were developed in the 1950s, principally in the United States. Synthesizers allowed composers to produce sounds electronically in almost any range, tone quality and volume.

In the 1960s computers were linked to sound synthesizers in order to automate some steps in the sound producing process.

By 1970 the techniques and devices of electronic music had begun to be used by composers of popular music. Also in this decade, composers were increasingly incorporating both electronic and traditional sound sources in the same works.

One reason for the growing popularity of electronic music has been the development of relatively inexpensive synthesizers, such as those manufactured by an American engineer named Robert Moog.

Leading serious composers in the electronic music field including Karlheinz Stockhausen, a German musician, who published the first electronic score in 1956.

Other leading serious composers of electronic music are the Americans Milton Babbit and Otto Luenging, the French American Edgard Varese and the Russian American Vladimir Ussachevsky.