It all seems like a labyrinth of questions and half-baked ideas, or the scintillation of a misled mind. So let me try to find the beginning of some threads, take them up and find my way through this maze like Theseus used Ariadne´s clew of yarn to find his way out of the Minotaur´s home.

I admit: part 1 was rather evil and vicious than constructive. Well, waking up isn´t always a nice thing. Anyway.

Where might we start thinking about new music, about new sound – and what´s even deeper – about new concepts for both?

Why I´m happy about old inedible yoghurt

or

What do yoghurt and Tolkien´s evil wizard Saruman have in common?

“The frequency of silence is 16 Hz” or “How a mayfly taught me the sound of life”

Let´s do a thought experiment to tune ourselves in and experience a bit of the spirit of these early days of electronic music.

To make in clear right at the beginning: this series of articles is not about having fun with or through music – not at all!

And let me begin in a rather vicious – and deliberately unfair – manner.

Producing a Piece of Early Electronic Music like in the 1950s

The following steps of the project are all done with the software “Berna 3”. The project itself is part of my new E-book about new and old approaches to producing electronic music. The book will be published in February 2023 (probably). This is  quite long article. If you are kind of impatient, well, then you might like to watch the video first. The link to it is at the end of this article.

… but it all sounds rather “far away in the past”, and quite theoretical. IT IS NOT! And I´m not going to bore you with mere theory. There is a software called “Berna” (most up to date version: “Berna 3”).

Berna is a simulation of these early electronic music studios. It contains equipment from the mentioned studio in Milan as well as from the studio in Cologne. But it is not just the old functionality packed in software, not just a bunch of physical/electronic functions transferred to code.

As promised in the video on my YouTube channel (https://youtu.be/3bFv87egkEY): Here is the patch:

Take the VCO BASAL and modulate its pitch with a sample and hold module triggered by an LFO.

Send BASAL´s output through a VCA to the reverb module PLATEAU, and open and close the VCA using the same signal which triggers the Sample and Hold Module.

Pioneering spirit, unbridled curiosity, radicalism in artistic thinking, dissatisfaction with the status quo and the rejection of any boundaries shaped the climate into which electronic music was born. Artists and technicians, musicians and physicists were the parents who brought new music to the world in the 1950s - electronic music. Some of them called their works timbre music, others still stuck to terms like atonal music for a while, not having found a more adequate term yet.