Siemens studio for electronic music
The Siemens studio for electronic music was the first programmable sound studio , which from 1956 to 1968 had a considerable influence on the development of electronic music , electroacoustic music within the new music , the synthesizer and the recording technology . In it, among other things, worked Josef Anton Riedl , Pierre Boulez , Henri Pousseur , Mauricio Kagel and Dieter Schnebel .
The technology was originally developed in a Siemens & Halske AG laboratory in Gauting and set up as a studio at the company's headquarters in Munich in 1960. In 1966 it came to the Ulm School of Design and was stored there in 1968. It has been exhibited in the Deutsches Museum in Munich since 1993 . Most of the components are ready for use.
In retrospect, the establishment of the studio by Siemens AG is described as "trend-setting music funding"; Pierre Boulez saw it as the real impetus for his turn to electronic music. The specific sound of some devices that are only available in the Siemens studio results in an "acoustic 'signature'" that can be recognized when listening to productions made in the studio.
history
The forerunner of electronic or electroacoustic music is the Musique concrète , created around 1948 , which goes back to the availability of sound recordings using magnetic tapes . In her self-image she has roots in ideas of futurism and connections to serial music . She saw herself as an avant-garde who wanted to overcome the sounds of musical instruments . Noises recorded and processed in reality or the electronic generation of abstract sounds came into question. Individual electronic instruments existed early in the 20th century, and electronic music has only been spoken of since around 1950. The concepts have been implemented since Stockhausen's prototype Study II from 1954.
For a planned documentary by director Otto Martini about the company Siemens & Halske AG , Carl Orff , who was hired as a consultant, suggested “music that fell out of the ordinary” in 1955. He recommended the young composer Josef Anton Riedl. Ernst von Siemens, who was very interested in music, was decisive in ensuring that Riedl received all the technical support and that the company's electroacoustic research laboratory in Gauting was made available to him. For the 1959 film Impulse of Our Time, Riedl not only created a soundtrack described as “drastically modern electronic sound design”, but also developed completely new devices with the company's engineers: analog sound generators, sound filters and mixing consoles were invented. The vocoder technique was invented for voice encryption during World War II . In Gauting it was rebuilt for music.
Similar developments took place in other studios at the same time. The electronic music studio of West German Radio in Cologne played since 1953, a role that Radio Corporation of America supported the Computer Music Center and experimented in New York with sound generation and influencing. In Milan there was the Studio di Fonologia Musicale der Rai . The Siemens studio differed from the others because for the first time audio tapes did not have to be cut and glued together, but all electronic devices were programmable. They were controlled modularly by punched tape and the sounds could be recorded in real time.
After the film was finished in 1959 and won the Federal Film Prize in 1960 , Siemens decided to continue using the devices. The technology developed for the film should stay together as a recording studio and give well-known composers the opportunity to develop a new world of sound. In addition, the studio would be rented to interested parties for recordings and Siemens planned to sell studio technology in the medium term. Riedl was appointed as the artistic director of the Siemens studio, the sound engineer and engineer was initially H.-J. Neumann, later Hansjörg Wicha. The studio remained in the laboratory in Gauting until the end of 1959, after which around 200 m² in the basement of the new Siemens building on Oskar-von-Miller-Ring in Munich was made available and the studio officially opened on April 1, 1960. The studio was regarded as the company's “showpiece” and was equipped with an anteroom, speaker room, artist room, control room and other rooms. For the move to Munich, a budget of 50,000 marks, described as "relatively generous", was made available; shortly afterwards another 31,000 marks were invested. Half of the operating time was available to an invited artist, the rest was rented to radio stations, especially Bayerischer Rundfunk , and other customers. The studio was busy at all times, rental income of 30,000 marks was booked for the 1961/62 financial year, and 50,000 marks were planned for the following year. In addition to compositions by recognized artists, soundtracks were created for a documentary film, several industrial and advertising films , sound samples for educational films, as well as two recordings of dance music and various sounds such as broadcast symbols and interludes for radio stations. In addition, broadcasters recorded radio plays with alienated language in the studio for electronic music.
During these years musicians and composers from all over the world came to the studio as guests, some experimented with the devices and recorded smaller works. Among the prominent guests were Karlheinz Stockhausen, composer and director of the Cologne studio, Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevski , two of the directors of the New York studio and self-employed composers. The artistic and technical directors of the large studios for electronic music were in close contact and exchanged their technical developments and musical ideas. Together they laid the foundations for electronic music and especially the technology of the synthesizer.
John Cage and David Tudor traveled specifically to try out the control with punched tape. György Ligeti and Dieter Schnebel were among the young composers who had the opportunity to try out electroacoustic music in the Siemens studio . Karl Amadeus Hartmann , Werner Egk and Alois Hába can be added to the older generation . Since neither they nor Bruno Maderna are connected to electronic music, it can be assumed that these guests did not make any recordings in the studio.
In 1963 Siemens no longer wanted to run the studio itself, the reasons being the high operating costs and the abandonment of the idea of marketing studio technology. The company donated it to the Ulm School of Design , where it was assigned to the Film Department under Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz . The devices stayed at the Munich location until 1966. Due to a lack of space in Ulm, the studio could not be fully installed there, so that a new mixer in particular had to be constructed. Shortly after the studio moved, the Hochschule für Gestaltung ran into financial problems, and the film department was able to survive the dissolution of the HfG for some time by transforming it into an association. The studio technology was stored in 1968 and only rediscovered in 1992 on the basis of research by Riedl. The Deutsches Museum received the devices in 1993, and parts of them have been on display in the music department's permanent exhibition since 1994 . Original tapes and the studio documentation were transferred to the Siemens archive in 1972; in 1993 they also went to the Deutsches Museum.
The studio in the Deutsches Museum is largely functional and has been presented several times a year with practical sound examples since 2001. In 2009 the structure was revised again, and some other functions could be restored.
technology
Devices of various origins were used in the Siemens studio. Much was developed and built by Siemens employees based on ideas from Riedl and other musicians. Siemens engineers Helmut Klein and Alexander Schaaf played a key role in the development. The studio as a whole has to be understood as a synthesizer according to today's parlance : sounds were generated, modulated and output or recorded. The specialty of the Siemens studio was the programmability with punched tape. In this way, the sounds and their chronological sequence could be archived in the form of the punched tape, reused and combined into larger works.
Sound generation
In the course of time, the studio received a large number of different tone generators . Many were specially built for this purpose, only a few could be taken over from production for other devices. A two-channel bass generator with frequencies between 0.3 and 26 Hertz produced largely inaudible sounds, but these could be used as input to a frequency converter or controlled synchronous motors . Noise generators and a sawtooth generator were used to generate technical noises with random components. Glissandi could be generated with beat hums , according to the documentation one of them could also be used for frequency modulation , which presumably means an external control by applying a control voltage . From around 1960, a wall with twenty sine wave oscillators from Vienna-Robinson bridges with a frequency band from 16 to 16,000 Hertz was available, the oscillations of which could change over to square waves of the same frequency using an additional circuit . Up to ten of the sine generators were required for a sound to near the ground - even harmonics to produce, and to provide such a familiar ear sound. Depending on the dynamics of the overtones, a dry, sudden, flute-like, glockenspiel-like or harmonica-like timbre or the impression of a vowel in human language could be achieved.
Of particular importance was a Hohnerola , an electronically controlled tongue organ from Hohner , which had been massively rebuilt by Siemens engineers. The electromechanical instrument could be completely controlled by punched tape. This affected the sound generation, and as formant -bezeichnete band-pass filter , and an attenuator for generating dynamics.
The studio also had a device built in 1959 by Südwestfunk that converted image scanning into sound elements. It was rarely used, the painter Günter Maas used it to translate some of his abstract paintings into sounds.
Using the bass generator, experiments were also carried out with digital sound generation . However, the data sources at that time did not provide sufficient frequencies, more than 64 Hertz could not be generated directly. In order to expand this frequency spectrum, very low tones were digitally generated and recorded on tape. This was played at eight times the speed, so that the notes were transposed three octaves upwards . If this process was repeated, the usual pitches for music could be achieved. Technical limitations of tape recorders made it necessary initially very low frequencies a higher carrier frequency aufzu modulate . At the end of the transposition, the signal first had to be demodulated, then the digitally generated tones could be separated by a low-pass filter . Because of the complexity, this method was only used experimentally, a recording of seven successive tones is obtained. In 1961 it was a matter of "pioneering achievements".
modulation
Filters and various modulators were used to influence electronic sounds . A set of 14 bandpass filters played a central role , which could be switched in any combination and controlled by punched tape. They were divided according to the Mel scale and together covered the entire frequency range. This filter bank was built into the Hohnerola. For the move to Ulm, a new mixer was built that contained tone controls that could take over the functions of the previous filters much more conveniently.
The mixer , known as a frequency converter, was invented in 1950 by Südwestfunk with the participation of Siemens AG. In 1956, Riedl procured such a device for his project in Baden-Baden. It was a ring modulator . When applied to the frequency spectrum of a musical tone with fundamental and overtones, such a modulator increases or decreases all frequencies by the same amount, i.e. it changes the relationship between the tones, which is decisive for harmony . As a result, every sound in the modulator becomes more or less noise . This effect was of particular importance for early electronic music and the device was therefore used in almost all works.
Devices for amplitude modulation were developed and built in the studio itself. The first generation was built into the Hohnerola, later independent devices were used. They were used to control the dynamics, which could initially only be programmed in 32 steps, later freely programmed. In addition, the engineers built a reverberation grille which, due to its “characteristic, metallic timbre”, shows that it was manufactured in the Siemens studio in many productions. In addition, tape recorders were available with which echoes and other overlays and iterations could be generated.
The vocoder from the Siemens studio was of particular quality . It was based on a prototype from the 1940s that had been developed for military encryption . This made it superior to all other vocoders that were used in recording studios. It had 20 channels and was specially modified for the Siemens studio in such a way that it could process a frequency spectrum from 0 to 10,000 Hertz and thus went far beyond speech applications. The circuits allowed input and control signals to be applied freely. This made it possible to generate an understandably speaking wind from speech and wind noise. The vocoder from the Siemens studio for the computer voice in the science fiction series Raumpatrouille , which was produced in 1965, is known to this day. The vocoder is no longer functional, the cabling has been lost.
A device called an envelope rectifier originally existed, but could no longer be found.
Mix and play
The central workstation in the studio was the mixer, also known as the control desk . Ten studio amplifiers and other devices were operated by 14 sliders. The assignment of the controllers to the devices was made individually for each task using a patch panel . At the outputs there were three level meters and one equalization each for lows, mids and highs. All inputs were designed for two- and four-channel sound; devices were added later to set them up for stereo recordings. A four-channel mixer was used for smaller tasks.
Various tape machines were used for recording and assembly by people who did not want to familiarize themselves with the programming using punched tape . These included four-channel devices and, from around 1963, also a six-channel device.
A special device for film dubbing was also purchased in Ulm so that the film projector, film scanner and tape recorder could be synchronized.
control
The programming of the electro-acoustic devices with punched tape was of particular importance for the development of electronic music. By simply exchanging pre-made perforated strips or gluing them together to form loops, only theoretical demands of serial music were previously possible. The Siemens studio was the first fully programmable studio.
Both the pitch, the volume and all filters for changing the timbre could be controlled in their course. Initially, four punched tape readers running in parallel were used. Each had the five rows of holes from the teleprinter , so that 2 5 , i.e. 32 different values could be used per strip . Because 32 values were not sufficient for the pitches, these were programmed with two strips: the first controlled the tone, the second indicated the octave . The third strip indicated the attenuation; a range from 0 to 64.5 decibels was available; the fourth switched on the bandpass filter and thus determined the timbre of the sound. Later even eight parallel punched strips were sometimes used, so that the attenuation of the volume could be controlled in steps of 0.5 dB.
reception
In retrospect, the role of the Siemens studio is described as the “center of progressives and a refuge for engineering-based art thinking.” Pierre Boulez was made aware of the Siemens studio when he was invited to Munich as a conductor for Musica Viva concerts: he was curious when he saw “what a company that had the means could do in terms of equipment.” It was there that he saw automated sound generators for the first time and they seemed to be “crucial for the future” - a few years later he considered them "indispensable". In a 2004 radio broadcast by Westdeutscher Rundfunk , Björn Gottstein described the Siemens studio as a “wild and particularly fruitful chapter in electronic music”.
Edgar Reitz called the studio “one of the leading breeding grounds for new music” and emphasized that it was Riedl's great merit that he “achieved with endless idealism [...] that the studio became an internationally recognized center for new music and especially for electronic music ”.
Riedl himself emphasized the “great charisma” of the studio for those who worked there and described it as the “more sensual” studio compared to the Cologne studio , which he remembered as “more [one] intellectual station”. As recently as 2014, he found the studio “still exists today, at this central, so important place in the Deutsches Museum”.
In 2014, the managing director of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation summarized the role of Riedl and the studio:
“The Siemens studio for electronic music is inextricably linked with the name Josef Anton Riedl. He made such remarkable use of the electroacoustic test laboratory provided by Siemens and worked congenially with the highly qualified technicians that he almost revolutionized the use of concrete and electronic sounds in music in a very short time. With his openness to the unusual and his strong drive for innovation, he was exactly the right person to transfer the maxims of a company like Siemens, which lived and still lives from technical innovations, to the field of music and to develop trend-setting compositional possibilities there. "
Works (selection)
A dissertation from 2011 identified around 150 works created in the Siemens studio, the directory of which comprises eleven pages. The International Documentation of Electroacoustic Music of the German Society for Electroacoustic Music contained almost 140 works at the beginning of 2014. The variety of compositions and recordings can be seen in the different areas of application:
In addition to the soundtrack for the Siemens documentary Impulse Our Time , two studies by Riedl, each around 150 seconds long, were made in Gauting until 1959. For the experimental film Hour X by Bernhard Dörries with a running time of 11 minutes from December 1959, the music was also recorded in Gauting.
1960 to 1962 Riedl recorded soundtracks for several documentary and industrial films by Edgar Reitz . Among them is the documentation Yucatan . The film premiered at the world congress of Jeunesses Musicales International in 1960 , was shown at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival in 1961 and received the title “Particularly valuable”. In 1965, Riedl and Reitz worked together again, creating a presentation for the International Transport Exhibition from June 25th to October 3rd in Munich.
Larger, publicly performed pieces of music that were created in the Siemens studio include several studies and compositions by Riedl from 1960 to 1965. In 1961, Herbert Brün created the Wayfaring Sounds and a production of Sounds on the Road for the Bavarian Radio and a new broadcasting symbol for the BR same year. A composition under the title Antithesis from 1962 came from Mauricio Kagel , as well as from Kagel the implementation of the electronic part of Imaginary Landscape No. 3 by John Cage from 1965. Cage himself recorded a study in the Siemens studio called experiments in sound . Pierre Boulez probably wrote sound experiments under the same title in 1963.
For Henri Pousseur's record series Introduction to Electronic Music , the first recordings published on sound carriers were made in the studio. In addition, Klaus Hashagen created an electronic carillon for the town hall of Salzgitter-Lebenstedt in the Siemens studio in 1961 . Bengt Hambraeus was possibly influenced by this for his work Rota II - Composition for electronic organ and bell sounds from 1963.
In 1962, Heinz von Cramer created the music for a radio play under the title The Great Image and various radio music . Günter Bialas recorded the music for the radio play It rains in my house in 1964 , directed by Hans Dieter Schwarze . Ferdinand Kriwet created two " audio texts" in 1965 and 1966 under the titles JAJA and Reaction , for which he electronically alienated language.
Various types of music and sounds were created in the Siemens studio in the 1960s for theater performances with an experimental character. Wilhelm Killmayer wrote a piece of music for Wilhelm Tell at the Bavarian State Theater in 1960 . At 150 minutes it is also one of the longest works recorded in the studio. Carl Feilitzsch also recorded music for Mittagswende in 1960 by Paul Claudel in the Münchner Kammerspiele and for Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Jedermann at the Munich Deutsches Theater . Riedl wrote music for a production of Georg Büchner's Leonce and Lena in 1963 at the Kammerspiele under the direction of Fritz Kortner , as well as for two other productions by Kortner: 1968 Der Sturm and 1969 Antonius and Cleopatra , both by William Shakespeare at the Schillertheater Berlin . In 1966, Milko Kelemen combined orchestral sounds, electronically alienated orchestral sounds and purely electronic sounds in the music for Judith von Friedrich Hebbel and recorded them with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra .
The film music composer Hansom Milde-Meißner created music in the studio for the documentary Creative Hands and a recording of experimental electronic dance music under the title Serenade for 20 Solo Generators (1964).
literature
- Stefan Schenk: The Siemens studio for electronic music . In: Munich Publications on Music History , Volume 72. Hans Schneider Verlag 2014, also dissertation at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-86296-064-4 . ( Online )
- Wolf Loeckle: "What's new?" Josel Anton Riedl, the Siemens Electronic Studio, nature . In: Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , edition 2014/2, pp. 24–27.
- Helmut Klein: Sound synthesis and analysis in the electronic studio . In: Frequency - Journal for RF , Volume 16/1962 No. 3, pp. 109-114
- Siemens cultural program (ed.): Siemens studio for electronic music . Munich 1994
- Siemens cultural program: Siemens studio for electronic music . audiocom multimedia, 1998 (CD with compositions from the studio)
Web links
- Deutsches Museum: The Siemens studio for electronic music. From: Masterpieces from the Deutsches Museum VI , 2004, ISBN 3-924183-96-1 .
- Simon Crab: The 'Siemens Synthesizer' H. Klein & W. Schaaf. Germany, 1959. 120 Years Of Electronic Music, February 2014.
- German Society for Electroacoustic Music : Entries with search term "Siemens". International documentation of electroacoustic music
Individual evidence
- ^ So Karlheinz Kaske in Siemens Kulturprogramm 1994, p. 7.
- ↑ a b Siemens Culture Program 1994, p. 9.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 198.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 30.
- ↑ a b c Deutsches Museum: The Siemens studio for electronic music . From: Masterpieces from the Deutsches Museum VI 2004.
- ^ Siemens AG: Impulse of our time .
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 49.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 49.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 51.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 50 f.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 56.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 61.
- ↑ a b Schenk 2014, pp. 242–246.
- ↑ Goethe-Institut: New Music - Review , July 2006
- ↑ Schenk 2014, pp. 60–67.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 76.
- ^ Deutsches Museum: special presentation of Siemens Studio
- ↑ Crab 2014.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 80 ff.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 83 f.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 84 f
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 86.
- ↑ Klein 1962, p. 110
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 82.
- ↑ Klein 1962, p. 111
- ↑ Schenk 2014, pp. 91–93
- ↑ a b Klein 1963, p. 114
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 133 f.
- ↑ Klein 1962, p. 112
- ↑ Schenk 2014, pp. 94 ff, 211 f.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, pp. 96-100.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, pp. 100-102
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 199.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, pp. 103, 109 f.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, pp. 104-109.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 110 f.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, pp. 112–115.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 119 f.
- ↑ Pascal Decroupet: Composing in the analog studio - a historical-systematic consideration . In: Elena Ungeheuer (Ed.): Handbuch der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert - Volume 5 Elektroakustische Musik , Laaber 2002, ISBN 3-89007-425-1 , pp. 36–66, 53.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 124.
- ↑ Schenk 2014, p. 128.
- ↑ a b c d Loeckle 2014.
- ↑ WDR 3 - open: Studio Electronic Music - studio portrait: Siemens-Studio Munich , broadcast on April 28, 2004. quoted from Schenk 2014, p. 78
- ↑ Heike Lies asks Edgar Reitz: Tireless Prophet of New Music . In: Andreas Kolb, Dieter Schnebel: Sound in Action - Josef Anton Riedl . ConBrio 2012, ISBN 978-3-940768-36-0 , pages 46-57, 50
- ↑ a b c Schenk 2014, pp. 204–214.
- ↑ German Society for Electroacoustic Music : International Documentation of Electroacoustic Music: Entries with search term "Siemens"
- ↑ The selection essentially follows: Siemens Kulturprogramm 1994, p. 34 f. supplemented by individual works from the overview at Schenk 2014, pp. 204–214 to cover all areas of application.
- ↑ Siemens Culture Program 1994, p. 34 f.
- ↑ Siemens Culture Program 1994, p. 14.
- ↑ Siemens Culture Program 1994, p. 35 f.
- ^ Siemens Culture Program 1994, p. 36.
- ^ Siemens cultural program: Siemens studio for electronic music , audiocom multimedia 1998, track 16.
- ↑ International documentation of electroacoustic music: Hansom Milde-Meißner
