Genres
Make Music
Artists
Albums
Challenges
Sign in
Sign in
Albums
By Tim Hecker
Albums
By Tim Hecker
Virgins
October 15, 2013
Listen
1
/5
Genres
Drone
Drone is a minimalist music genre defined by sustained tones, long durations, and extremely gradual change. Harmony is often static or centered on a single fundamental with subtle overtone shifts, while rhythm tends toward stasis or very slow pulses. Sound sources range from acoustic instruments (e.g., strings, organ, bagpipes, shruti box, tambura) to electronics (sine waves, oscillators, feedback, tape loops, and later digital synthesis and processing). Many composers favor just intonation or other alternative tuning systems to emphasize beating patterns, psychoacoustic effects, and the internal life of sound. Although drone as a sonic principle is ancient and global, the modern experimental genre cohered in the 1960s through the New York minimalists and related avant‑garde circles, then spread into ambient, experimental, and heavy music scenes. The focus is less on melody and more on timbre, resonance, and the phenomenology of listening.
Discover
Listen
Experimental
Experimental music is an umbrella term for practices that prioritize exploration, process, and discovery over adherence to established genre norms. It embraces new sound sources, nonstandard tuning systems, indeterminacy and chance operations, graphic and open-form scores, extended techniques, and technology-led sound design (tape, electronics, computers, and live processing). Rather than a single style, it is a methodology and ethos: testing hypotheses about sound, structure, and performance, often blurring boundaries between composition, improvisation, sound art, and performance art. Listeners can expect unfamiliar timbres, unusual forms, and an emphasis on how music is made as much as the resulting sound.
Discover
Listen
Electroacoustic
Electroacoustic music is a broad art-music tradition that integrates recorded acoustic sound and electronically generated or processed sound into coherent musical works. It privileges timbre, gesture, texture, and spatialization over conventional melody-and-harmony song forms, often employing tape manipulation, synthesis, live electronics, and computer-based signal processing. Works are frequently composed for fixed media (stereo or multichannel loudspeakers) and may also involve live performers who are transformed in real time. Concert presentation typically emphasizes spatial diffusion and immersive listening, and the repertoire spans concert works, radio pieces, installations, and soundscape compositions.
Discover
Listen
Similar albums
1994
Kyema, Intermediate States
Eliane Radigue
1983
Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks
Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno
1978
Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Brian Eno
2007
And Their Refinement of the Decline
Stars of the Lid
2017
Small Circle 小圈子
Understatement 輕描淡寫
2025
Tranquilizer
Oneohtrix Point Never
2001
The Tired Sounds Of
Stars of the Lid
2003
Radio Amor
Tim Hecker
2011
Ravedeath, 1972
Tim Hecker
2017
Music for Nine Post Cards
Hiroshi Yoshimura
Download our mobile app
Get the Melodigging app and start digging for new genres on the go
Download on the App Store
Get it on Google Play
© 2026 Melodigging
Give feedback
Legal
Melodding was created as a tribute to
Every Noise at Once
, which inspired us to help curious minds keep digging into music's ever-evolving genres.