The Cologne studio was built from a collaboration of several individuals. Each individual had different skills and backgrounds which contributed to the shaping of electronic music principles that grew from Cologne.

In 1948, Dr. Werner Meyer-Eppler, a mathematician , physicist, and director of Phonetics at Bonn University, was visited by Homer Dudley, a researcher at Bell Labs. Dudley had brought a brand new invention called a vocoder (Voice Operated reCOrDER) which analyzed and synthesized speech. Meyer - Eppler was impressed. He made reference to it in an account on the history of electronic instruments (Elektrische Klangerzeugung). He demoed a tape of vocoder sounds at a lecture on electronic sound production at North-West German Music Academy. In the audience was Robert Beyer from West- german Radio.

Beyer, an inventor and author, was interested in the use of electronic in music production. He and Meyer-Eppler joined forces and gave a lecture on ' The Sound World of Electronic Music' at Darmstadt. Beyer concentrated on design and manufacturing of electronic equipment, and Meyer-Eppler concentrated on research in speech synthesis. They were joined by composer Herbert Eimert. Eimert was a devotee of 12 tone music, and saw the potential of electronic sound in creating pure 12 tone compositions, un -encumbered by the acoustic limitations of available instruments.

In 1950, Harold Bode brought a Melochord, a monophonic wave form generator with a keyboard, for them to check out. They used it to produce music by layering tracks of tones. In 1951 they presented their results at Darmstadt in a lecture entitled, 'The possibilities of Electronic Sound Production', Beyer wrote a paper on 'Music and Technology', and Eimert discussed 'Music on the borderline'. Schaeffer attended the summer program that year and the tension between  Music Concrete and Electronic Music came to a boil.

1951. A radio station in Cologne broadcast an evening program called ' the Sound World of Electronic Music'. The show featured a forum between Eimert, Beyer and Meyer- Eppler. The director of the station, Fritz Enkel, was impressed and agreed to establish a studio to research electronic music. The studio took two years to become fully operational. Eimert was named as the artistic director.

During the interim that the studio was being constructed, Meyer-Eppler gave a lecture on ' The Methods of Electronic Tone Generation' to around 2000 technologists in Bonn. The gospel of electronic music was spreading.

In 1952, composer Bruno Maderna produced 'Musica sue due Dimensioni', which featured flute, percussion, and taped tones projected through a loud speaker, which was presented at Darmstadt. In the audience was Stockhausen as well as other future electronic music composers such as Klebe, Koenig, Hambraeus, Goeyvaerts and others. Stockhausen was also studying with Messian at this time.

Ironically, the Maderna piece was not pure electronic as it also featured natural flute and percussive instruments, revealing a softening in the hard-line principles of pure electronic music.

Beyer and Eimert composed the first all-electronic works while the studio was still in construction. Klang im unbegrenzten Raum (1951-1952), Klangstudie 1 (1952), and Klangstudie II (1952-1953). They were ironically premiered in Paris.

The studio became partially functional and other composers began to compose. At this time Stockhausen became associated with the studio. In 1953 he was appointed to assistant director under Eimert. In 1963 he became the sole director until 1978. When he became director, the studio was reconstructed to include two production rooms. One for sound and tone generation, and the other for recording and playback. Music Concrete and Electronic Music began to merge as in Eimert's Selecktion (1959) in which spoken text was included (although it was manipulated beyond recognition, it still involved found sound).

"The first step to real musical control of nature has been taken by electronic music. Its dependence for reproduction on the loudspeaker - which moreover has brought about an as-yet-scarcely-noticed subterranean revolution in hearing- at last permits risking the hypothesis that the symphony fixed on disk or tape may be the surrogate  and electronic music the true music . Here, we may surmise, is the point at which the true order of music is revealed." [1]

Bibliography.

Russcol, Herbert, The Liberation of Sound :  An Introduction to Electronic Music , Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1972

1) p.89

Manning, Peter, Electronic and Computer Music , NY, Oxford University press, 1985

Schrader, Barry, Introduction to Electronic-Acoustic Music, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1982