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In its original incarnation...
Trance was a type of dance music that used:
(1) Lots of "spacey" sounds, often using a high-resonance low-pass filter and a good deal of filter modulation -- probably the most common being the famous TB-303 "acid" sound.
(2) Simple, quick, and very repetitive melodies, melodic fragments, or arpeggios, not usually lasting longer than two to four bars.
(3) A fairly fast, four-to-the-floor beat, generally somewhere from 130 - 150 beats per minute, though there are exceptions.
(4) Gradual, incremental progression of a track through addition of new melodic and percussive elements ("layers") or modulation and modification of existing ones. Addition of new elements almost always happens at some multiple of four bars (four, eight, sixteen, etc.). Also, the traditional verse-chorus structure of pop is entirely absent from most tracks.
(5) Few "breaks" or beatless parts, with breaks rarely going for longer than half a minute to a minute, although a number of tracks had beatless intros and outros.
(6) Generally there were no sung vocals, and what sung vocals were used almost never had lyrics. Short spoken phrases were sometimes used.
Today's most popular variety of trance is a lot different than the old stuff:
Now the sounds are generally less "spacey;" the old "acid" sound is far less common, its place of prominence being taken by a sound called the "supersaw;" the melodies are often longer, slower, and more complex, and generally include a more prominent and obvious "hook;" the BPMs are somewhat slower; the slowly building, incremental structure has mostly been abandoned in favor of a "128-bar buildup + breakdown" structure; instead of layers with roughly equal prominence, there is generally one "lead" layer that plays the main melody and overpowers the other parts of the track; breaks are generally at least a minute long, but often run to two or three minutes; sung vocals with lyrics are far more common, which has also meant that the pop verse-chorus structure appears a lot more often than it used to.
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Defining Trance
