Werner Meyer-Eppler

Werner Meyer-Eppler (* thirtieth April 1913 in Antwerp , † 8. July 1960 in Bonn ) was a German physicist , information theorists , communication researchers , phonetics and pioneer of electronic music .

He received his doctorate in physics on February 22, 1939 and remained an assistant at the physical institute in Bonn until December 31, 1945. On September 16, 1942, he completed his habilitation at the mathematics and science faculty there. Immediately after the war he found out about the state of research in the USA. As early as 1947 he moved to the phonetic institute of the philosophical faculty, where he officially became a scientific assistant on April 1, 1949. He published essays on synthetic speech generation and introduced American inventions such as the coder, the vocoder, the visible speech device. He was a co-developer of the electrolarynx , which is used as a larynx replacement for total larynx surgery. In 1952 he received another license to teach, this time in phonetics and communication research. In 1954 he received an invitation to join the French Committee for Phonetics and Linguistics. In 1956 he got a diet lecturer, in 1957 an unscheduled professorship. In 1957 he became a professor for phonetics and communication research. In 1959 Meyer-Eppler published his main work "Fundamentals and Applications of Information Theory". Meyer-Eppler died on July 8th, 1960 of chronic kidney disease.

Through his research, Meyer-Eppler was one of the very few people who came into contact with the techniques of electronic sound synthesis during the Second World War , because he had access to the latest technology, such as the magnetophone . In his publications the term electronic music appears for the first time in the German language.

He gave many lectures on electronic sound generation and electronic music at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music and later on the radio. As a result, musicians like Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer became interested in the new possibilities. In this episode, the first studio for electronic music of the NWDR was created , Meyer-Eppler played a major role here. Precisely because he was not an insider in the music scene, he was able to judge the difficulties of the music business correctly. His counter-proposal was electronic music . But because the trivialization of electronic means in music was foreseeable, he made strict requirements: "Music is not to be called" electronic "if it uses electronic aids, since it is by no means sufficient to use the existing sound world or even an existing one To transfer music into electro-acoustic. " Well-known musicians like Karlheinz Stockhausen belonged to his students , others like Werner Kaegi only received his writings and lectures. The thinking - also the musical - of a generation was decisively influenced by it. Meyer-Eppler achieved an impact far beyond the narrow circle of experts.

Fonts

• Electronic sound generation: Electronic music and synthetic speech . Ferdinand Dümmlers, Bonn 1949
• Electronic composition technique , in: Melos 1 (1953), pp. 5–9 ( full text )
• Statistical and psychological sound problems ( The series ; 1: Electronic music ), 1955. Also in English under the title Statistic and Psychologic Problems of Sound , 1958.
• Basics and applications of information theory. Communication and cybernetics in individual representations . Volume 1. Springer-Verlag, Berlin 1959. 2nd edition, ed. by Georg Heike and K. Löhn. Springer, Berlin et al. 1969

literature

• Sonja Diesterhöft: Meyer-Eppler and the vocoder . 2003
• Morag Josephine Grant: Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001, ISBN 0-521-80458-2 .
• Werner Kaegi: What is electronic music? Orell Füssli Verlag, Zurich 1967
• Marietta Morawska-Büngeler: Swinging electrons: A documentation about the studio for electronic music of the West German Broadcasting Corporation in Cologne 1951–1986 . PJ Tonger Verlag, Cologne-Rodenkirchen 1988
• Dieter Stock:  Meyer-Eppler, Werner. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , p. 379 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Elena Ungeheuer: How electronic music was "invented" ... Source study on Werner Meyer-Eppler's musical draft between 1949 and 1953 . Schott, Mainz 1992, ISBN 3-7957-1891-0 .

Web links

• Meyer-Eppler-Archiv in the archive of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin