Grab some magnetic tape and a splicing block and go make music, or wave your hands in front of two antennas, just like the pioneers of electronic music used to.

But the craft of making an electronic tune is vastly different today.

The history of electronic music has been constantly changing, according to Nathan Wolek, an associate professor of music at Stetson University in De Land, Fla., who teaches a course called The History of Electronic Music.

When Wolek first proposed his class, people asked him how one could teach such a course.

“There is kind of perpetual newness about what happens in electronic music, and there is a long, deep and varied history there going back to the 19th and the 20th centuries,” he said.

Wolek explained that electronic music was more about science and innovation back at the turn of the 20th century, citing the telharmonium, a type of electronic organ created in 1897, as one of the first electronic instruments.

“Thaddeus Cahill created the first instrument, the telharmonium, but the problem with it is that it weighed several tons and there were only a few of them made, so it was not a viable instrument for commercial sale,” Wolek said.

Wolek said the second innovation of electronic music was in the ‘20s with the theremin, an instrument you play while waving your hands in front of two antennas, one for pitch and one for volume.

After the theremin, Wolek said the third innovation of the ‘20s was the ondes martenot, a steel string-type of instrument similar to the theremin, which the band Radiohead still uses in their performances.

After the innovators came the “take” music in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

“[It’s] where you take recordings of sound and manipulate and sequence it, creating new and interesting effects in rhythm,” Wolek said.

According to Jesse Stewart, a Carleton music professor, in the ‘20s only a very small elite had access to magnetic tape and tape recorders, but today, because of the relative affordability of computers and music software, people have very powerful tools for electronic music production at their disposal.

“We live in a time where virtually the entire history of recorded sound is available to us in synchronic form,” Stewart said.

“So we can go online and with a few clicks we can basically access any sound that has ever been recorded,” he said.

“I think people want to use it and recontextualize it and do stuff with it to create something new.”

Wolek said accessible programs have made electronic music producing available to a much larger group than previous generations.

“It’s gone from being a fringe activity to being a kind of mainstream activity. I think that is the biggest story,” Wolek said.

In terms of the splintering of electronic music into so many different genres associated with it, Wolek said there are micro and macro levels to electronic music production.

“It seems like whenever someone changes one little thing with the music, they deem it a new genre,” he said.

“Some of it is overkill in terms of, ‘You do this one thing different then all of a sudden you have created a whole new genre,’ that is at the micro level,” he said.

“At the macro level I think the technology doesn’t discriminate with the type of music you want to make, and it goes in different directions like house, techno, drum and bass,” said Wolek.

“There are commonalities to how to put together an electronica track, [for example], but there are a few kind of subtle parameters you change that make you go in one direction or the other in terms of genre,” Wolek said.

“I am of the school of thought that [genres have] more in common at the end of the day than differences,” he said.