House music is a form of electronic dance music that originated in Chicago in the early 1980s and quickly expanded to American cities like New York City and Detroit as well as international music hubs like London and Paris. House music and its many subgenres are characterized by a steady pulse (typically a 4/4 time signature) played around 120 beats per minute (bpm).

A Brief History of House Music

Since emerging in Chicago in the 1980s, house music has become a global phenomenon.

• Early days and pioneers: House emerged as a new music genre in Chicago in the early 1980s. Its pioneers were a group of Black American DJs who were well versed in disco and hip hop subcultures, and who embraced emerging synthesizer technology from brands like Roland and Korg. Some of the most prominent producers and DJs of early house music include Chicagoans Ron Hardy, Frankie Knuckles, Mr. Lee, Jesse Saunders, J.M. Silk (aka Jack Master Silk) Chip E., Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, Marshall Jefferson, and Larry Heard (aka Mr. Fingers). New Yorkers like Larry Levan also figured prominently in early house music.
• Chicago roots: Music historians typically trace house music to a nightclub called the Warehouse, located in Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood. There, DJ Frankie Knuckles—sometimes called the “godfather of house”—created continuous dance grooves by splicing together records with a steady four-on-the-floor pulse and tempos ranging from 120 to 130 beats per minute. House tracks often use the Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines; the term “house music” comes from the fact that these machines allowed DJs to create tracks at home without the use of an expensive studio.
• Emergence of acid house: One of the first offshoots of house music was acid house, characterized by heavy use of the Roland TB-303 Bass Line synthesizer. The subgenre is named for the song “Acid Tracks” by Phuture, a Chicago collective featuring Herbert “Herb J” Jackson, Nathan “DJ Pierre” Jones, and Earl “Spanky” Smith Jr.
• House music’s global influence: House music quickly spread beyond Chicago, becoming the soundtrack to raves in London, Sheffield, and the Spanish island of Ibiza. In Detroit, it inspired a closely related genre called Detroit techno. A collective led by Juan Atkins called the Belleville Three began combining Chicago house with electro-pop from German groups like Kraftwerk. Meanwhile, in New York and New Jersey, a prominent house scene sprung up at the Paradise Garage nightclub in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. Led by DJ Larry Levan, this version of house music became a lynchpin of the region’s gay culture, particularly for Black and Latin American men.
• House music today: House music has remained a steady presence at raves and on dance playlists, and it has also cracked the Top 40 at various points. French house groups like Daft Punk and St. Germain have released platinum records featuring their version of house. The genre also appears in contemporary hip-hop and pop.

4 Characteristics of House Music

House music covers many subgenres, but a few characteristics provide a throughline.

• 1. Steady, propulsive beats: House is known for its 4/4 time and four-on-the-floor kick drum pulse. Off-beat hi-hat patterns and hand claps help give the music a funky edge.
• 2. Dance tempos: Nearly all house music falls between 120 and 130 beats per minute, which makes it easy to dance to.
• 3. Emphasis on early synthesizers: House artists frequently compose their music with 1980s synthesizers such as the Roland TR-808, the Roland TR-909, the Korg Poly-61, and the Roland TB-303 Bass Line. You can hear these instruments on the seminal house track “On and On” by Jesse Saunders.
• 4. Disco and soul influences: House emerged from the soul and disco era, and while it does not use the live instruments of those genres, it often embraces their funky, soulful style. This is particularly true of early house music such as the 1986 song, “Can You Feel It?” by Mr. Fingers.

11 House Music Subgenres

The house music genre includes multiple subgenres.

• 1. Acid house: Acid house is famous for the synth basslines of the Roland TB-303 synthesizer.
• 2. Chicago house: Chicago house music is rooted in the early techniques and equipment of 1980s Chicago producers.
• 3. Electro house: A slightly faster form of house, electro house music is famous for its buzzing basslines and sawtooth synths.
• 4. Deep house: Deep house is a subgenre characterized by heavy beats from a Roland TR-909 drum machine and flourishes of 1970s funk.
• 5. Funky house: Funky house music remixes samples from 1970s R&B and funk music.
• 6. Tropical house: Tropical house music incorporates Caribbean styles like dancehall, and it tends to have a slower tempo.
• 7. Latin house: Latin house music is built on Latin rhythms derived from salsa and other popular dance genres.
• 8. UK hard house: UK hard house is a British house sound known for its off-beat bass accents and faster tempos.
• 9. Tech house: The tech house subgenre was built on the minimalist harmonies and grinding electronic drumbeats of techno music.
• 10. Progressive house: Also known as prog house, this genre adds elements of progressive rock music to standard house.
• 11. Detroit techno: Detroit techno shares many elements with house music—including a greater emphasis on harmonic shifts compared to most techno.

Nobody can agree on who invented the blues or birthed rock & roll, but there is no question that house music came from Frankie Knuckles, who died Monday afternoon of as-yet-undisclosed causes at age 59. One of the Eighties and Nineties’ most prolific house music producers and remixers, Knuckles is, hands down, one of the dozen most important DJs of all time. At his Chicago clubs the Warehouse (1977-82) and Power Plant (1983-85), Knuckles’ marathon sets, typically featuring his own extended edits of a wide selection of tracks from disco to post-punk, R&B to synth-heavy Eurodisco, laid the groundwork for electronic dance music culture—all of it.
Frankie Knuckles: 5 defining tracks from the Chicago house pioneer
Knuckles made an abundant number of dance classics, including early Jamie Principle collaborations “Your Love”(1986) and “Baby Wants to Ride”(1987); “Tears”(1989), with Satoshi Tomiiee and Robert Owens; “The Whistle Song”(1991); and his remixes of Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody”(1989), Sounds of Blackness’s “The Pressure” (1992), and Hercules and Love Affair’s “Blind” (2008).

Born Francis Nicholls in the Bronx on January 18, 1955, Knuckles began hitting New York’s after-hours spots such as the Loft, the Sanctuary, Better Days, and Tamburlaine—the clubs where disco was born—as a teenager, along with his best friend, Larry Philpot. By the mid-Seventies, both of them were DJs themselves, and Philpot had changed his surname to Levan. The duo worked together at two of the most important early discos: the Gallery (presided over by Nicky Siano, whose smooth on-beat mixing style was enormously influential) and the Continental Baths, a multi-room gay bathhouse on Manhattan’s West Seventy-fourth Street. (Two other entertainers got their start there: Bette Midler and her pianist, Barry Manilow.)

By 1977, both started their own clubs in difference cities. While Levan (who died in 1992) helmed the Paradise Garage in Soho, Knuckles moved to Chicago, where Robert Williams, an old friend of both, was opening what became the Warehouse. A narrow building with oblong windows at 206 South Jefferson St. (today it’s a law office), the Warehouse was where Knuckles began honing his sound and style—”a wide cross-section of music,” as he told The Guardian in 2011. His mélange of disco classics, weird indie-label soul curiosities, the occasional rock track, European synth-disco and all manner of rarities would eventually be codified (at Importes, Etc., the record shop where Knuckles bought much of his music) as “House Music”—short, of course, for the Warehouse. (In 2004, the block where the Warehouse stood was renamed Honorary Frankie Knuckles Way.)

At a time when Saturday Night Fever had cranked up disco’s profile till it blanketed pop culture, Knuckles favored the music’s weirdoes and rebels. He spun tracks on independent labels like Salsoul and cheesy-exotic synth-disco from Italy. He liked things floridly dramatic and stark (First Choice’s “Let No Man Put Asunder,” Black Ivory’s “Mainline”); he liked party conviviality (Positive Choice’s wonderfully loose “We Got the Funk”); he liked genuine strangeness (Two Man Sound’s heavily phased “Que Tal America”). Working with reel-to-reel tape, he’d re-edit his favorite tracks to extend the grooves for his dance floor. “It wasn’t traditional disco like Donna Summer,” Jesse Saunders, another Chicago DJ of the time, said in 1995. “It was really R&B.”
It was also enormously influential. Chicago was a DJ town, with local radio broadcasting several mix shows starting in the late Seventies, and nearly every jock in the city bowed to Frankie. One of the city’s most popular jocks was Farley Keith Williams—then “Funkin’” Farley Keith of WBMX-FM’s Hot Mix 5 DJ team, and later a Chicago house hit-maker as Farley “Jackmaster” Funk. “Honestly, when I started, I didn’t go out buying new records,” Farley said in 2008. “I went out and regurgitated what Frankie Knuckles would play.”
Knuckles was so popular that the Warehouse—initially a members-only club for largely black gay men—began attracting straighter, whiter crowds, leading its owner, Robert Williams, to eschew memberships. Knuckles left in November 1982, opening the Power Plant a few months later. Not long after that, a fast-talking young DJ from Detroit named Derrick May, who’d recently been knocked flat after hearing Knuckles for the first time, sold Frankie a drum machine to further enhance his mixes—something several DJs in Chicago (and Detroit) were already doing.

That combination of bare, insistent drum machine pulse and an overlay of cult disco classics just about defines the sound of early Chicago house music—a sound many young local producers were beginning to mimic in the studio by 1985. That year, Knuckles made his first recordings with an ethereal-voiced, Prince-obsessed singer-songwriter named Byron Walford, a.k.a. Jamie Principle. The pair’s early tracks were recorded in the Power Plant DJ booth, but they soon graduated to local studios. Several of their songs together wound up released by the local label Trax Records—without the artists’ permission, as both Knuckles and Principle later insisted; it’s just one example of the cutthroat business practices at the dark heart of early house music.

Frankie Knuckles – WBMX Friday Night Jams 1986 by Sarah Davies on Mixcloud
But the music wasn’t just popular in the city’s clubs or party-rental spaces. Chicago house blew up in England in 1986, with Farley “Jackmaster” Funk and Daryl Pandy’s “Love Can’t Turn Around,” hitting the U.K. Top Ten and J.M. Silk’s “Jack Your Body” going to Number One in January 1987. “I remember being interviewed by a journalist in ’86,” Knuckles told Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton in The Record Players: DJ Revolutionaries. “And I remember telling her this music’s gonna be around for a while. It’s gonna take it a long time for it to get to where it needs to be at, but it’ll be around for a long time.”
Though the dance charts were about as far as most Chicago house titles went in their home country, house music—as well as Detroit techno, the style Derrick May was helping pioneer—not only yielded actual chart hits overseas, they fueled a new style of clubbing. In the summer of 1987, a group of English DJs—including Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling—traveled to the Mediterranean island of Ibiza and were turned on to both a more expansive playlist than usual, thanks to DJ Alfredo of the open-air club Amnesia, and a new drug: MDMA, or Ecstasy. Bringing that combo back to England, Rampling’s Shoom club, followed by Oakenfold’s Spectrum, birthed what the Brits called “raves”: enormous gatherings, usually in warehouses or open fields, of kids wearing smiley-face T-shirts while dancing all night, often on Ecstasy, to house and techno.

Knuckles wasn’t interested. In 1988, he returned home to New York and took on a series of club residencies—the World, the Roxy, the Sound Factory, and Sound Factory Bar (a different venue) among them—and teamed up with manager Judy Weinstein and fellow DJ David Morales (who’d filled in for Levan at the Paradise Garage) to form Def Mix Productions, a studio umbrella that altered the job description of a club remixer. Rather than simply change the arrangement or even grafting a new track onto an existing song, Knuckles and Morales would remake the source material from the ground up, even bringing the artist back in to cut a new vocal. Eric Kupper, a keyboardist and producer who worked on many of Knuckles’ great Nineties recordings, said that Frankie’s work “had a little more of an arrangement going on” than Morales’.

“[When] you’ve got someone as big as Luther Vandross and Michael Jackson sitting there saying, ‘Whatever you want, however you want it, I’ll stay here as long as you need me,’ that’s the reward right there,” Knuckles said in 2011. “All the programmers I worked with were all classically trained musicians . . . I was teaching them a different side of what it is they do. Infusing certain ideas like Debussy-esque piano over a very thick house track or bass line is something that blew their minds. It blew mine, too, but it’s something they never imagined and/or heard of before . . . We didn’t know if it would work or not, but it did.”
Though Knuckles kept up a heavy DJ schedule throughout his career, health problems, as well as the waning popularity of his type of traditionalist house music, led to his quieting down on the production front in the 2000s. In July 2008, Knuckles’ right foot was amputated: He’d broken it during a 2000 snowboarding accident in Switzerland, leading to a bone disease exacerbated by late-breaking diabetes.
But that year, Knuckles’ profile got a significant bump. For one thing, younger DJs and producers were discovering vintage Chicago house music, from Knuckles’ tracks to mid-Nineties “ghetto house” on labels like Dance Mania. For another, Knuckles released his remix of Hercules and Love Affair’s “Blind” that year—a deeply moving version that tops an already great original. Knuckles was “considered a huge risk” to work on the track, DFA co-head Jonathan Galkin said in 2011: “Is he gonna get it? He’s a main room remixer a lot of times . . . So going to that guy for our indie leftfield disco record? He knocked it out of the park.”

More recently, Knuckles was regularly hitting the global club and (occasionally) festival circuit—and regularly converting kids who’d never heard of the Warehouse. Exhibit A: His sizzling Boiler Room session from April 2013. “When he was defining house music, all of us were running around the Christmas tree with a fucking toy drum,” went the introduction. “So show some love, show some respect—throw yourself in the dirt for Frankie!”

Greek philosophers and medieval theorists defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies, and vertically as harmonies.

If painting can be viewed as a visual art form, music can be viewed as an auditory art form.

The broadest definition of music is organized sound. There are observable patterns to what is broadly labeled music, and while there are understandable cultural variations, the properties of music are the properties of sound as perceived and processed by humans and animals (birds and insects also make music).

Music is formulated or organized sound. Although it cannot contain emotions, it is sometimes designed to manipulate and transform the emotion of the listener/listeners. Music created for movies is a good example of its use to manipulate emotions.

Music theory, within this realm, is studied with the pre-supposition that music is orderly and often pleasant to hear. However, in the 20th century, composers challenged the notion that music had to be pleasant by creating music that explored harsher, darker timbres. The existence of some modern-day genres such as grindcore and noise music, which enjoy an extensive underground following, indicate that even the crudest noises can be considered music if the listener is so inclined.

20th century composer John Cage disagreed with the notion that music must consist of pleasant, discernible melodies, and he challenged the notion that it can communicate anything. Instead, he argued that any sounds we can hear can be music, saying, for example, “There is no noise, only sound,”[3]. According to musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1990 p.47-8,55): “The border between music and noise is always culturally defined–which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus…. By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be.”