How did electronic music create new possibilities for organizing harmony?

Electronic music has fundamentally transformed the organization of harmony by breaking away from the constraints of traditional scales and functional harmonic systems. By enabling the creation of sounds from an infinite range of pitches, electronic media allows composers to move beyond the classical duality of consonance and dissonance.1

Key ways electronic music has reshaped harmonic organization include:

• Dissolution of Traditional Scales: Electronic instruments are not limited to the scales produced by conventional instruments, allowing for the use of microtones and entirely new pitch relationships.12
• New Organizational Systems: Pioneers like Karlheinz Stockhausen developed systems that regulate musical elements such as density of sonority, rhythmic change, and the spatial distribution of sound through modulated loudspeakers, pointing toward a fundamentally different approach to harmony.1
• Precision and Complexity: Technologies like the RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer allowed composers to encode properties like pitch, timbre, and vibrato with extreme precision, enabling the creation of complex sonic structures that exceed the capabilities of human performers.3
• Computer-Assisted Composition: The use of computers to determine sound materials and their organization has further removed music from traditional harmonic constraints, treating it instead as "organized sound".45

Ultimately, while traditional harmonic progression may become irrelevant in these contexts, electronic music shifts the focus toward the structural control of sound as a pure, expressive medium.1