ï~~Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference 2011, University of Huddersfield, UK, 31 July - 5 August 2011
ing musicians, technicians and theorists from many of the
newly established radio and research studios in Europe
and the US. [41, 1] Most of these researchers had actually met before, whether at conferences, festivals, or at
their respective studios; among them were Pierre Schaeffer and his technician Jacques Poullin from the RTF studio in Paris; and Werner Meyer-Eppler, Oskar Sala, and
Friedrich Trautwein from the new studios in Cologne and
Berlin. What was significant about the 1954 meetings,
however, was that their goal was to promote the potential
creative applications of the latest in spatial acoustics. The
intersection between electroacoustic recording and transmission technologies and concert hall or studio acoustics
was one of the hottest topics of discussion. More than
a quarter of the presentations dealt directly with multichannel projection, and the agenda also included a number
of film, concert, and broadcast demonstrations. At these
meetings, techniques developed at the studios in Paris and
Cologne were displayed alongside new cinematic and telecommunications industry improvements on the pre-war
systems developed by Bell Labs and Disney. Nevertheless, it is already possible to detect a heightened effort
in these early presentations to distinguish the work of the
electroacoustic studios from mere commercial fancies by
emphasising the production and perceptibility of what were
understood to be radically new structures and experiences.
Although Jacques Poullin's presentation at Gravesano
in 1954 was predominantly technical, his discussion of
the potentiom&tre d'espace ("space potentiometer")2 positioned it not as a new application of stereophony but as
affording a fundamentally new form of experience. By the
time of Poullin's presentation the device had been a fixture
in the practices of musique concrete for some time. It was
employed most notably in the Symphonie pour un homme
seule and the original production of the opdra concrete,
Orphie in 1951, [20] and in 1953 at the tumultuous production of Orphde 53 at the New Music Festival in Donaueschingen.[52] It was also demonstrated to audiences and
journalists during the UNESCO-sponsored "First International 10 Days of Experimental Music" in Paris in 1953.
[67] Designed partly in an effort to draw the attention of
the audience away from the proliferation of machinery on
stage, the potentiom&tre mapped the panning of sounds
from a makeshift multichannel tape deck to a performer's
conductor-like gestures. [54] Setting aside its role in engaging the audience in the spectacle, however, the key innovation of the device was described by Poullin by contrasting a stimulating three dimensional experience to a
"normal" two dimensional listening situation: "When the
four loudspeakers are properly placed, the listener will
sense acoustic impressions from all directions of the space
surrounding him; he finds himself thus at the middle point
of a sounding information space and thus in an unfamil2 Poullin's presentation describes only one of many versions of this
device, alternately known as the pupitre d'espace (space desk) and the
pupitre de relief which was first used in 1951. Earlier versions had
employed only a three-channel speaker system. For contrasting technical
descriptions see: [39, 41, 42]
iar situation, since in normal musical presentations the orchestra is found most often on the frontal plane opposite
the public." [41] His statement echoes a distinction which
had already become standard at the studio.
Although early tapes produced in Schaeffer's studio
survive only as single channel masters [38], which was
the only suitable format for radio broadcast or commercial release at the time of their production, multichannel
projection played a significant role in both theory and performance practice. Like the technicians who had worked
on the production of Fantasia twelve years earlier, composers and critics associated with Schaeffer's studio considered dynamic manipulation of the sound locations to
be among their work's most sensational and revolutionary aspects. [39] In his first book describing the studio,
however, written partly as a plea to the RTF to sustain its
support for his experiments, Schaeffer was determined to
distinguish spatialisation from "ordinary stereophony" by
contrasting its potential formal consistency with the banal
"realism" of the entertainment industry.3 As he wrote, the
role of stereophony was not to "reproduce a preexisting
relief, but to give the sound objects of musique concr&te
a spatial development coextensive with their own forms."
[54] His collaborator, the physicist and theorist Abraham
Moles, went further:
"The experiments here are much more interesting:
leaving aside the criteria of truth, they look towards a new effect, of a new musical art form. As
much as music is a dialectic of duration and intensity, the new procedure is a dialectic of sound
in space, and I think that the term spatial music
would suit it much better." [original emphasis] [54]
Use of the potentiom&tre d'espace for concert projection even extended to tapes by composers who were
far less convinced of Schaeffer's overall project, such as
Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez. [20] Despite their
otherwise strong disagreements, Boulez positioned himself somewhat closer to Schaeffer when it concerned the
distinction of spatialisation from stereophony. Writing
in 1955 for Die Reihe, Boulez had come to the conclusion that the complete organisation of musical structure
had left only "projection in space" as the "final problem
connected with 'performance'". Nevertheless, techniques
like stereophony would only "begin to be really fruitful
when they adapt[ed] to the needs of genuinely modern
musical thought." Stereophony in "common usage," on the
other hand, had been "vulgarized by the cinema and different sorts of son-et-lumire pageant." It had to become
a "structural necessity" if it was not to be "swallowed up
by these more demonstrative aspects." [15]
Following in the wake of his work with Schaeffer,
Boulez continued to be implicated in multichannel experiments on his early forays away from Paris. He had
3Schaeffer's comments take on special irony when one considers the
fact that within the RTF the role of his studio at the time was sustained by
its work as an effects shop, producing soundtracks for radio programmes
and for flight-training films for the French military. [55]
44
