Welcome back to Motherboard Vault, our weekly look at videos from Motherboard’s ever-growing archives.Just about everybody considers “electronic music” a tired phrase in this era of a million genres and subgenres. It’s not that it’s a bad term really, but more a victim of semantic limitations; how could one label encompass everything from the angsty dubsteppy shit Midwestern teens are listening to, to obsessively nerdy 8-bit bleeps and bloops, and intricate compositions and soundscapes that hearken back to the earliest days of circuit bending? If electronic music just means it was produced using computers and whatnot, what music these days couldn’t be labeled as such?Thankfully, there are people like Curtis Roads who’ve told labels to go jump in a lake and focused on producing the kind of electronic jams that a computer might actually listen to. A professor at UC Santa Barbara (ahem my alma mater, internet bro-bump), Roads is immersed in the world of microsounds, which more or less are sounds too small to be individual notes. His work involves granular synthesis, which is rather insane: Sounds are broken down into individual grains, which can be recombined to make new sounds with a precision and nuance that only a replicant’s ear could fully appreciate.It’s kind of like being able to manipulate atoms to create new chemical compounds, but with sound. If that sounds crazy, it’s because honestly, it’s not easy to understand, let alone explain, but Roads did an admirable job filling us in when we paid a visit to him in 2009. I do know that the end product sounds occasionally like being able to hear a computer actually think, and other times like you’ve been dropped in the middle of the war scenes in Terminator. As I sit here and have my mind blown while listening to his work, I can’t help but think that the coming robot takeover isn’t going to sound half bad.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.