The Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio (German: ) was a facility of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne. It was the first of its kind in the world, and its history reflects the development of electronic music in the second half of the twentieth century.

Founding On 18 October 1951 a meeting was held at the then Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk in connection with a tape-recorded late-night programme about electronic music that was broadcast on the evening of the same day. Informed via a report on this meeting, the Intendant (General Manager) of the radio station, Hanns Hartmann, gave the green light for establishment of the studio. In this way, this date may be regarded as the founding day of the Studio für elektronische Musik.

Participants in the meeting, among others, were Werner Meyer-Eppler, , Fritz Enkel and Herbert Eimert. Robert Beyer had been speaking of timbre-oriented music since as early as the 1920s. He thought the time was ripe to bring this idea to fruition. Fritz Enkel was the technician who conceptualized the first establishment of the studio. Herbert Eimert was a composer, musicologist, and journalist. In the 1920s he had published a book on the theory of atonal music, which had gotten him expelled from 's composition class at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln. Ever since his youth, he had stood on the side of radical musical progress and organized concerts with noise instruments. Eimert was the first director of the Studio für elektronische Musik. Werner Meyer-Eppler was a docent (lecturer) at the Institute for Phonetics and Communication Research of Bonn University. He had first employed the term electronic music in 1949, in the subtitle of one of his books, Elektrische Klangerzeugung. Elektronische Musik und synthetische Sprache. After the inventory he made in this book of electronic musical instruments developed up to that point in time, Meyer-Eppler experimentally developed in his Bonn Institute one of the basic processes of electronic music, namely the compositional creation of music directly on magnetic tape.

At the end of the above-mentioned report the availability of the men Trautwein (Düsseldorf) and Meyer-Eppler (Bonn) was pointed out. Cologne lies between Düsseldorf and Bonn. In the early 1930s Friedrich Trautwein had developed the Trautonium, one of the earliest electronic musical instruments. A version of the Trautonium, called the Monochord, was created for the studio. Meyer-Eppler carried out his experiments in Bonn with a Melochord. Harald Bode had constructed this instrument and modified it according to Meyer-Eppler's wishes. A Melochord was therefore also purchased for the Cologne studio. The Monochord and, especially, the Melochord can be understood as precursors to or an early form of the synthesizer. Synthesizers played an important role in the subsequent history of the studio.

Beginnings

When the viability of the project was still in doubt, a demonstration piece was urgently needed to show what might be done. It was believed at the time that securing the means for the music department to set up a studio depended on having a piece to broadcast as soon as possible. Eimert and Beyer were not yet in a position to produce an actual example of music, and so the studio technician Heinz Schütz assembled what is officially documented in the records of NWDR Cologne as the first production of the studio (even though the studio did not yet actually exist). It was titled Morgenröte (The Red of Dawn) signifying "the beginning". Schütz has never considered himself to be a composer, and regards the attribution to him of this "piece", which "was produced with very primitive means, which is all that was available to us in those days", as "purely an accident".

Initially, the Monochord and Melochord were used in the Cologne Studio together with other equipment. A noise generator provided a rushing-noise signal, like what is heard for example in short-wave radio on frequencies between radio stations. Filters were important for transforming sounds. An octave filter attenuates an input signal (like white noise, for example) into several octave-wide frequency bands. Two band-pass filters allow only a single band of frequencies to pass through from an input signal. By using the band-pass filters instead of the octave filter, this band could be adjusted in width and centre frequency. In addition there was a so-called ring modulator, which mixed two input signals multiplicatively, in contrast to the additive mixing done with a mixing console. The ring modulator was used for intense sound transformations. An oscilloscope made sounds visible. A four-track tape recorder allowed the synchronisation of several separately produced successions of sounds. Two single-track tape recorders were used to copy one tape to another. By using the mixer, new sounds could be recorded along with those from the first audio tape while copying to the second tape recorder (one of Meyer-Eppler's key 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 here, in a cross-plug-in busbar panel, so that the connections of the individual devices with one another could easily be established and modified as needed.

Because right at the very beginning the Monochord and Melochord were not yet available—but tape recorders probably were—Robert Beyer and Herbert Eimert were restricted to sound materials that Meyer-Eppler had made in Bonn. Meyer-Eppler's tapes were edited and mixed. Although Beyer and Eimert could not really produce original music this way, they nevertheless gained substantial experience in dealing with the procedures developed by Meyer-Eppler. As the studio finally took concrete form, Beyer and Eimert were able to create, both together and separately, some sound studies, following purely auditory criteria. The first public demonstration of these pieces took place in a Neues Musikfest (New Music Festival) presentation on 26 May 1953 in the large broadcasting studio of the Cologne Radio Centre. This event was announced at the time as the official opening and founding of the studio. These studies give a very free impression and betray a certain carelessness in their production. Anyone familiar with the tone colours of analogue synthesisers will be able to hear many familiar tones here. While Beyer seems to have been quite satisfied with the results, the more rigorous Eimert disagreed with this improvisational playing around and assemblage. Eimert wanted to establish real composition in electronic music. This disagreement led to Beyer's resignation from the studio a year later.

When the newly completed NWDR Funkhaus (Broadcasting Centre) was opened in 1952, the Electronic Studio was initially quartered in the anteroom of Production Studio 2 of the chamber-music hall, with additional facilities in Sound Studio 2. Eimert and Beyer produced Klangfiguren II here, and later Stockhausen realised both of his Elektronische Studien (1953–54) and Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56) there.

Serial music and sine-tone composition From this point onward Eimert actively followed the recommendation in the opening of the report by the Intendant mentioned above: "It would only be necessary to make these suitable facilities available to composers commissioned by the radio station." That is, he invited young composers who appeared suitable to him to realize the ideal of composed electronic music in the studio. Since the early 1950s, the most radical European composers had set themselves the goal of totally organizing all aspects of music. They started from the view of twelve-tone technique, but only the pitches were organized (in series of notes). The French composer Olivier Messiaen had the idea in the late 1940s of transferring the organisation of pitches onto durations, dynamics, and, conceptually, even timbres. Messiaen had two students in Paris who took up his thoughts and from then on were the best-known representatives of serial music—as it was called—Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In the 1970s Boulez would become the founder and director of one of the most important institutions in this field, IRCAM.

Eimert invited Stockhausen to become his assistant at the Cologne studio, and he arrived in March 1953. In 1952 in Paris, at Pierre Schaeffer's Groupe de Recherches de Musique concrète, Stockhausen had already acquired some experience with various sound and tape editing processes. From this he knew that pitches, durations, and amplitudes could in fact be determined very accurately, but timbre eluded serial organisation. Soon after his arrival, Stockhausen came to regard the Monochord and Melochord (which had been purchased on the recommendation of Meyer-Eppler) as useless for the production of music that was to be organised in all its aspects, especially timbre. He turned to Fritz Enkel, the head of the calibration and testing department, and asked for a sine-wave generator or a beat-frequency oscillator capable of producing sine waves, from which Stockhausen intended to build sound spectra. Enkel was shocked, since the two recently acquired keyboard instruments, which Stockhausen was now telling him were of no use at all, had cost 120,000 Marks. Besides, Enkel told him, "It will never work!" Stockhausen responded, "Maybe you're right, but I want to try it all the same".

Incorporation of natural sound material After composing two works entirely from sine tones—Studie I and Studie II, in 1953 and 1954, respectively—Stockhausen decided to use sound material that could not be created from the devices in the studio, namely speech and song. No doubt he was influenced by Meyer-Eppler, with whom he studied phonetics and communications theory from 1954 until 1956. It was from Meyer-Eppler that Stockhausen learned about aleatory and statistical processes, and became convinced that these were necessary to avoid the sterility toward which totally organised music tends to lead. For his next electronic composition, Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56), he established connections between the different categories of human speech sounds 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 and diphthongs such as ai) corresponded to sine tones and their combinations, plosive consonants (p, k, t) to pulses, and fricative consonants such as f, s, sh, and ch, to rushing noises. Stockhausen on the one hand 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 various degrees to the vocal sounds. He wanted to achieve a continuum between electronic and human sounds. In any event, the first step had been taken towards the inclusion of materials other than sounds produced purely by electronic means. Electronic music from the Cologne studio thereby came closer conceptually to the musique concrète from Paris.

Further developments