How did atonal music and 12-tone music help prepare the way for electronic music?

Atonal and 12-tone music helped prepare the way for electronic music by fostering a broader movement in 20th-century composition that sought to liberate music from the traditional Classical-Romantic reliance on tonality and key centers.12

By abandoning the necessity of a central key, Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School established new methods of musical organization, such as the 12-tone technique, which utilized all 12 chromatic pitches as independent entities. This shift toward rigorous, self-determined systems—later known as serialism—encouraged composers to view musical elements like pitch, rhythm, and structure as materials to be manipulated through precise, intellectualized rules rather than traditional harmonic conventions.3421

This mindset of total organization and the search for new technical resources directly informed the development of electronic music. Composers like Milton Babbitt were drawn to electronic synthesizers precisely because the technology allowed them to realize their complex, serialized musical concepts with a level of precision and control that was impossible with conventional human performers and instruments.15