Studio for Electronic Music (Cologne)

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The studio for electronic music in Cologne is a recording studio of the West German Broadcasting Corporation , which is considered the first of its kind in the world. Its history reflects the development of electronic music in the second half of the 20th century.

history

founding

On October 18, 1951, a meeting was held on what was then Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk on the occasion of a broadcast of a night program tape about electronic music on the evening of the same day. Informed by a report about this meeting, the director of the station, Hanns Hartmann, gave the green light for the establishment of the studio. In this respect, this day can be seen as the founding date of the electronic music studio.

The following took part in the meeting: Werner Meyer-Eppler , Robert Beyer , Fritz Enkel and Herbert Eimert . Robert Beyer had already spoken of timbre music since the 1920s . He saw the time was ripe for its realization. Fritz Enkel was the technician who designed the studio's first facility. Herbert Eimert was a composer, musicologist and journalist. In the 1920s he had written an atonal music theory , which earned him the discharge from the Cologne University of Music (he later became a professor there). He has been on the side of radical musical progress since his youth and organized concerts with sound instruments. Eimert became the first director of the electronic music studio. Werner Meyer-Eppler was a lecturer at the Institute for Phonetics and Communication Research at Bonn University. In 1949 he was the first to use the term "electronic music" in the subtitle of one of his books (Electrical Sound Generation. Electronic Music and Synthetic Speech). After taking stock of the electronic musical instruments developed up to then in this book, Meyer-Eppler experimentally developed one of the basic processes of electronic music in his Bonn institute, namely the compositional music design directly on magnetic tape. Concrete music is a variation of this .

At the end of the report mentioned, it was pointed out that Messrs. Trautwein (Düsseldorf) and Meyer-Eppler (Bonn) were tangible. Cologne lies between Düsseldorf and Bonn. Friedrich Trautwein developed the Trautonium , one of the early electronic musical instruments, in the early 1930s . A version of the trautonium, the monochord , was created for the studio. Meyer-Eppler carried out his experiments in Bonn with a melochord . Harald Bode had designed this instrument - modified according to Meyer-Eppler's wishes. A melochord was therefore also purchased for the Cologne studio. The monochord and above all the melochord can be seen as a precursor or an early form of the synthesizer. Synthesizers played an important role in the studio's later history.

The beginnings

The monochord and melochord were used in the Cologne studio together with other devices. A noise generator delivered a noise signal as it is e.g. B. can be heard on FM radio on frequencies between the radio channels. Filters were important for sound changes . An octave filter attenuates an input signal (such as noise) on several frequency bands one octave wide . Two bandpass filters only allowed a single frequency band to pass through an input signal. In contrast to the octave filter, this band was adjustable in width and center frequency with the bandpass filters. There was also a so-called ring modulator that mixed two input signals in a multiplicative way, unlike additive mixing in a mixer. The ring modulator was used for powerful sound transformation. An oscilloscope was used to make sounds visible. A four-track tape recorder made it possible to synchronize several separately produced sequences of sounds. Two single track tape recorders were used to copy from one tape to another. Using the mixer, additional sounds could be recorded on the second tape together with those from the first tape (one of Meyer-Eppler's main ideas). The mixer consisted of two groups of eight channels each. It had remote controls for the four-track tape recorder and the octave filter . In addition, the inputs and outputs of all sound sources, filters, and modulators converged in a crossbar field, so that the connections between the individual devices could be easily established and changed as required.

Because monochord and melochord were not yet available at the very beginning - but tape recorders were - Robert Beyer and Herbert Eimert limited themselves to sound materials that Meyer-Eppler had produced in Bonn. Meyer-Eppler's tapes were processed and mixed. With this, Beyer and Eimert were not yet able to produce their own music, but they gained significant experience in dealing with the procedure developed by Meyer-Eppler. When the studio finally took on the form described above, Beyer and Eimert - together and alone - produced some sound studies. These studies make a very free impression and reveal a certain carelessness in their production. Anyone who knows the timbres of analog synthesizers will be able to hear some familiar tones here. While Beyer seems to have been quite happy with the results, the more rigorous Eimert disapproved of this improvisational playing and piecing together. Eimert wanted to establish the compositional in electronic music. This disagreement led Beyer to leave the studio a year later.

Serial music and sine tone compositions

From now on, Eimert actively followed the recommendation from the aforementioned report to the artistic director: "It would only be necessary to make these facilities accessible to suitable composers commissioned by the radio." That means, he invited young composers who seemed suitable to him, to realize the ideal of composed electronic music in the studio. Since the early 1950s, the most radical European composers had come to the goal of a music that was totally organized in all aspects. They proceeded from twelve-tone music, which only organized the pitches (in rows of pitches). At the end of the 1940s, the French composer Olivier Messiaen transferred the idea of ​​organization from pitch to tone duration, volume and conceptually to tone colors. Messiaen had two students in Paris who took up his thoughts and from then on became the best-known representatives of - as they were called - serial music : Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen . Boulez became the founder and director of one of the most important institutes in this field, IRCAM , in the 1970s .

Stockhausen had already gained experience with the various recording and tape editing processes in Paris. From this he knew that the pitch, duration and volume could be determined very precisely, but that the timbre eluded serial organization. In the Cologne studio he saw the aforementioned monochord and melochord instruments, which had been purchased on the recommendation of Meyer-Eppler, as useless for the production of music that was organized in all aspects. He turned to Fritz Enkel, the head of the measurement department, and asked about sine generators . He wanted to assemble the timbres from individual sine tones according to his own compositional ideas.

In painstaking detail work in the studio of Stockhausen, Eimert and other composers such as Karel Goeyvaerts , Paul Gredinger , Gottfried Michael Koenig , Henri Pousseur , Bengt Hambraeus and Franco Evangelisti , each sound was "composed" for a time from individual partial tones. Eimert provided the definition of serial music: “Serial music extends rational control to all musical elements.” The “parameter”, as it was said, that had evaded this control the longest, timbre, was developed in the electronic music studio composable. Every sinus tone could be precisely determined in terms of frequency, amplitude and duration. When copied one on top of the other, the sine tones resulted in sounds or mixtures of tones whose color was directly determined by the composition plan and no longer depended on tradition (as in the case of mechanical instruments) or the instrument developer, as in the case of the melochord.

The underlying idea was that every sound can be imagined composed of sine tones. Because of the increasing noise and increasing distortion with every further copying process, only a very limited number of sine tones could be composed with the existing technology without serious loss of sound quality. The resulting sounds and mixes were according to plan, but simply and roughly structured. With pieces created in this way, the impression is less that of timbres and more of chords. Theodor W. Adorno commented that electronic music sounds like Anton Webern is being played on the Wurlitzer organ.

The composers themselves were disappointed. Synthesizing satisfactory sounds only from sinusoidal tones requires the use of technology that was not available in the 1950s. The composers looked for ways to make the rigid sounds livelier and reduce the amount of work. In doing so, they made use of the options available in the transmitter, such as the reverberation rooms for adding reverberation, and the devices that remained in the studio, such as ring modulator and various filters. Monochord and melochord were no longer used, only the pulse generator in the monochord was increasingly used.

One goal of the work in the studio was the implementation of timbre transitions. Transitions, i.e. intermediate stages, for example between pitches or tonal strengths, were already possible as glissando or crescendo / diminuendo with traditional mechanical instruments and with electronic music. Continuous changes in the duration of the tone could be implemented as accelerations and decelerations. However, timbre transitions - something in between a trumpet sound and a violin sound - were and cannot be represented by mechanical means. This was a task of electronic music that Robert Beyer had long formulated.

From the mid-1950s, three types of generators were used in the studio to produce sound: the sine wave generator, the noise generator and the pulse generator . The latter did not generate continuous signals, but rather short cracking noises. The time interval between the clicks could be adjusted. At intervals of up to about 1/16 of a second, the cracking noises could still be heard individually. At shorter distances, the perception of a pitch began, which was higher the shorter the distances became. The result was a sound that contained a large number of high partials and was very shrill. It was therefore an ideal object for filters, with which the desired frequency components could be filtered out of the sound.

A third octave filter was added to the octave filter and the bandpass filters . With the third octave filter, frequency bands with the range of a third octave could be raised and lowered in strength (today third octave filters are commonly known as graphic equalizers). Sounds with many partials (so-called broadband signals) could be "re-colored" as desired.

Another filter was what is known as a tunable display amplifier. This device - a special bandpass filter - could be set to such a small bandwidth that it began to oscillate sinusoidally at the set center frequency (so-called filter with natural resonance or also called self-oscillating filter). Otherwise, for example, with broadband signals, he could make individual partials audible in isolation.

Inclusion of sound material

After two sinus tone compositions, Stockhausen decided to use sound material that could not be produced by the devices in the studio, namely speech and song. (He was undoubtedly influenced by Meyer-Eppler, with whom he was studying phonetics at the time.) He made connections between the various categories of human sound production on the one hand and those of the three main types of sound production in the studio on the other . Vowels (a, e, i, o, u ...) corresponded to the sine tones and their combinations, plosives (p, k, t) to the impulses and fricatives (f, s, sch ...) to the noise. On the one hand, Stockhausen subjected the recording of a child's voice to the same manipulations as the sounds and noises produced in the studio and, on the other hand, tried to approximate the latter in different degrees to the vocal sounds. He wanted to achieve a continuum between electronic and human sounds. In any case, this was the first step towards the inclusion of other sound materials than purely electronically generated ones. The electronic music from the Cologne studio thus conceptually approached the Musique concrète from Paris.

Further advances

Lawo PTR mixer

Gottfried Michael Koenig , who assisted in the implementation of their pieces in the Stockhausen studio and other composers, was himself a composer of electronic music and above all the most consistent theoretician of electronic music. Above all, the instrumental music did not let him rest, which (despite the banishment of monochord and melochord) now persisted in electronic music through the "instruments" sine tone generator, noise generator, impulse generator. Thinking in terms of the parameters of pitch, duration, strength, etc. was taken from instrumental music. The longer experience had been gained in the studio, the clearer it became that these terms were no longer appropriate for complex sonic phenomena, as they emerged from the intensive use of all technical possibilities. This was also reflected in the difficulties encountered in attempts to notation electronic music. While simple sine tone compositions with information on frequencies, durations and sound levels could still be graphically represented comparatively easily, this was no longer possible with the increasingly complex pieces from the mid-1950s. Koenig wanted to create a music that was really "electronic", that is, conceived in terms of the given technical possibilities of the studio and no longer dragged along hidden reminiscences of traditional instrumental ideas. So he started from scratch, so to speak, wondering what the individual device can do, what combinations are there between the processes within several devices (simultaneously or sequentially using tape storage), and what options are there to control these processes.

In practice, his pieces, which he realized in the studio until 1964, represent systematic experiments to sound out electronic sound quality. In theory, however, he was already in 1957 - at a time when Max Mathews was making the very first experiments with sound generation by a computer in the USA made it clear that the technical possibilities of this studio were very limited. If the sine tone was, so to speak, the element of sound that could not be further broken down, it could still be regarded as “instrumental” with its frequency and strength properties. In an essay that illustrates some of Koenig's consequences from working in the studio, he spoke of the individual "amplitudes" that he would like to determine. A sine tone is already a series of consecutive “amplitudes”. Nowadays, the term sample describes what Koenig meant, namely the elongation (distance from the zero axis) of a signal at a point in time. Koenig later developed a computer program that could produce sequences of "amplitudes" regardless of higher-level "instrumental" parameters.

In another work from this period, Stockhausen applied his idea of ​​the sound continuum to instrumental sounds. The electronic sounds should approximate the sounds of percussion instruments of the metal, wood and skin categories. The creation of “metallic” sounds, for example, benefited from the fact that the studio now had a reverb plate for creating reverberation. In addition, a device for rotating sounds in the room was built according to his ideas, a rotary loudspeaker whose sounds were picked up by microphones placed around it.

In his longest “electronic” work, the studio manager Herbert Eimert completely dispensed with the sounds produced by generators and only used the recording of a short poem performed by an actor as the starting material. Here the idea of ​​the continuum was actually fully realized, because everything audible represents only a stronger or weaker modification of the original material (whereby the weakest modification is identical to the original, which can be heard at the beginning and in parts in the further course of the piece). A so-called tempophone was used in an outstanding way during the production. On the one hand, this made it possible to stretch and compress durations without changing pitch (transposition) and, on the other hand, to carry out transpositions without changing the duration. In extreme cases, a short speech sound (e.g. the m in the word 'fisherman') could be extended to any duration.

Modernization of the studio

Herbert Eimert retired in 1962. His successor in the artistic direction of the studio was Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1963. Together with Gottfried Michael Koenig, he carried out an inventory and an assessment of the studio's situation. The compact studio, which Fritz Enkel had set up a decade earlier for ease of use, had become a collection of individual devices, most of which were not intended for use together. In the meantime, other studios and research institutions had taken significant steps towards better integration of the equipment. In the first half of the 1960s, the foundations for this integration of various devices were laid in the USA in the form of what is known as voltage control. While many of the devices in the Cologne studio had to be operated by hand until the 1960s (e.g. by turning buttons), the voltage control enabled automatic regulation of the volume progression, for example. For three years the compositional work in the studio was reduced. Contacts were made with other studios, and previous work was documented. The studio moved to new, larger rooms, and a lot of money was invested in state-of-the-art instruments. In America, Stockhausen got to know the aforementioned automation, which he described as desirable in 1965 when he proposed new equipment for the studio. Nevertheless, it was not until the early 1970s that the principle of voltage control moved into the Cologne studio.

Moving away from serial principles and continuing to develop

The pieces that were produced in the studio are characterized by a departure from the strict serial processes of the 1950s, especially since Gottfried Michael Koenig, the last representative of serial music, left the studio in 1964 to take over the management of the Institute for Sonology at the Rijksuniversiteit in To take over Utrecht. Younger composers such as Johannes Fritsch , David Johnson and Mesías Maiguashca developed the possibilities of electronic sound generation and modification in a more playful and unconventional way. Whether electronically produced and processed or mechanically generated, recorded by microphone and then electronically manipulated, no sound was fundamentally excluded from use in electronic music. Stockhausen himself based one of his longest electronic works on recordings of national anthems. In addition, there were recordings of animal noises, crowds, radio stations, construction site noises, conversations, etc. The main principle of the design was the modulation of properties of one sound by the properties of other sounds. For example, the volume curve of a recording could influence any parameters of an electronically generated sound. In his work, Mauricio Kagel placed particular emphasis on complex circuitry in the devices (including feedback from device outputs to their own inputs) in order to achieve the most unpredictable results possible. Johannes Fritsch had an amplifier amplify its own noise and hum and made it the sound material of a composition. Mesias Maiguashca recorded sounds from, among other things, Cologne Central Station and train journeys into music ( Telefun , 1963).

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Dismantling and temporary unusability

Due to the sale of the house in which the studio was located, the studio was dismantled in 2001 and temporarily set up in a basement room of the WDR. Due to the limited space, it was not possible to use all devices.

Relocation to Mödrath

In July 2017, Westdeutsche Rundfunk announced that at the suggestion of the Mödrath House Foundation, the studio would move to an outbuilding of the Mödrath House - the house where Karlheinz Stockhausen was born. However, this model has been in question again since January 2020.

Trivia

Google dedicated a doodle in its search engine to the studio on October 18, 2017, on the 66th anniversary of its founding .

literature

  • Robert Beyer: The problem of the music to come. In: Die Musik 9 (1928), pp. 861–866
  • Herbert Eimert: What is electronic music? In: Melos 20 (January 1953), pp. 1-5
  • ders .: The sine tone. In: Melos 21 (1954), pp. 168-172
  • ders .: Article "Electronic Music". In: Music in the past and present. Vol. 3, columns 1263-1268, Kassel 1954
  • ders. (Ed.): Electronic music. the series. Information on Serial Music, Vol. 1. Universal Edition. Vienna 1955
  • ders .: Introduction to electronic music. Basic acoustic and theoretical terms. On the history and composition technique. LP. Mainz 1963
  • ders .: Notes on the epitaph and the six pieces. In: Supplement to the record “Herbert Eimert: Epitaph for Aikichi Kuboyama. Six pieces ”. Mainz undated (circa 1963), pp. 1-6
  • Franco Evangelisti: From silence to a new world of sound. In: Music Concepts 43/44, Munich 1985, pp. 40–166
  • Werner Meyer-Eppler: Electronic composition technology. In: Melos 20 (January 1953), pp. 5-9
  • Marietta Morawska-Büngeler: Vibrating electrons. A documentation about the studio for electronic music of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Cologne 1951–1986. Tonger, Cologne-Rodenkirchen 1988, ISBN 3-920950-06-2
  • Gottfried Michael Koenig: Electronic music studio. In: Music in the past and present. 16, columns 59-62, Kassel 1976
  • ders .: Aesthetic practice. Lyrics to music. Pfau, Saarbrücken
  • André Ruschkowski: Electronic sounds and musical discoveries. Reclam, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-15-009663-4
  • Herman Sabbe: The Birth of Electronic Music from the Spirit of the Synthetic Number. In: Heinz-Klaus Metzger & Rainer Riehn (eds.): Karlheinz Stockhausen. … How time passed… Musik-Concepts booklet 19th edition Text and Criticism, Munich 1981, pp. 38–49, ISBN 3-88377-084-1
  • Karlheinz Stockhausen: Texts on electronic and instrumental music. Volume 1. Cologne 1963
  • ders .: Texts on your own works, on the art of others. Current. Volume 2. 3rd edition Cologne 1988
  • ders .: Texts on music 1970–1977. Volume 4, Cologne 1978
  • Elena Ungeheuer: How electronic music was "invented". Source study for Werner Meyer-Eppler's draft between 1949 and 1953. Schott, Mainz [u. a.] 1992, ISBN 3-7957-1891-0
  • Peter Donhauser: Electric sound machines. The pioneering days in Germany and Austria. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2007, ISBN 978-3-205-77593-5

Sound carrier

The CD produced by Konrad Boehmer offers an overview of the pieces from the 1950s:

  • Acousmatrix - history of electronic music VI. Cologne - WDR. BV Haast, 2004

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sonja Diesterhöft: Meyer-Eppler and the vocoder. TU-Berlin, 2003, accessed August 2020 .
  2. ↑ Source in the weblinks section: Museum or production facility? The studio for electronic music of the WDR . In: NZZ .
  3. ^ WDR and Stiftung Haus Mödrath: New future for the "Studio for Electronic Music of the WDR" . In: presseportal.de . August 24, 2017.
  4. ^ Haus Mödrath - spaces for art - the studio. Retrieved January 25, 2020 .
  5. ↑ A new sound was born in the electronic music studio. Welt Online, accessed October 18, 2017 .