History of Electronic Music Collection Response

For this assignment, I chose to do a comparison of two pieces of music from the History of Electronic Music collection on UbWeb. There were a lot of songs to choose from, so I decided on listening to the first song and then a random song from further down the list. The songs were For Ondes Martenot by Messiaen and 2 Pianos and Ring Modulation 4 by Karlheinz Stockhausen.
The first piece, For Ondes Martenot, was a fairly simple track. There was not a whole lot of different sounds. It sounded a lot like some sort of ambiance track that you would hear in a video game or a movie. It was slow and very smooth. There was very little in the way of percussion or other sharp, staccato sounds. The sounds that were there were all played in sort of a drone. It had a very ethereal sound. There was a couple sounds that sounded like strings, but it mostly reminded me of someone playing a glass harmonica. I was impressed by the fact that the artist managed to create electronic sounds that imitated instruments fairly closely back in 1937.
The second piece, 2 Pianos and Ring Modulation, was a bit more complex than the first track. While it also only had two or three different sounds, there is a lot more going on in terms of notes and chords. This piece was also much more chaotic, almost as if it was performed by someone randomly slamming their hands down on a keyboard (which, given the movement we've been covering lately, would not surprise me). The thing that was interesting about this piece was that even though it was very random and discordant, I could still pick out bits and pieces of an actual melody. These snippets of what sounds like an actual song inside this chaos makes me think that maybe, just maybe, some people who make “noise music” may actually know what they are doing.