He finished École Polytechnique with a diploma in radio broadcasting. While Schaeffer was from a music family – both parents were musicians – he himself didn’t have a music education. By that time, Schaeffer already experimented a lot, creating music with phonogenes, gramophones, and other equipment at his employer Radiodiffusion Française (now called Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, French Radio and Television Broadcasting). And, as an additional nice touch, the recording quality of 48khz/32-bit still exceeds the quality of most contemporary radio transmitters and Internet streaming services.ġ949, France: Pierre Schaeffer, a radio engineer, broadcaster, and a former member of French resistance, who had a special interest in music, met Pierre Henry, a classically trained music composer and percussionist. Playback speed can be manipulated and/or reversed with Vari-Speed knob control. The reels can be switched, loaded and erased. The recordings are made into reels, which are conveniently stored inside a SD card. How does it relate to Morphagene? Well, Morphagene’s most basic functions are the functions of a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Liberated tape, French experimentationĪfter the war, Magnetophon was taken to the United States and soon the technology became available commercially. Magnetophon from a German radio station in World War II. It was achieved by introducing AC bias to the recording, an inaudible high-frequency signal to mitigate distortion. The main difference between Magnetophon and other tape recording machines of its time was recording fidelity, which exceeded the quality of most radio transmitters. It was based on the magnetic tape invention by Fritz Pfleumer, who granted AEG the patent rights. The recordings were made on Magnetophon, a pioneering reel-to-reel tape recorder developed by German electronics company AEG in the 1930s. As it turned out, what they were hearing was a new, advanced audio recording technology – magnetic tape recording. Maybe his speech was prerecorded? But it lacked the characteristic surface noise of disc or cylinder playback. Yet every time they listen to the broadcast of his live speech, it turns out it’s being broadcast from another city, not the one he’s supposed to be in, according to the intelligence. They think they know the location of Adolf Hitler. For example, we describe the initial phase of the sound as ‘attack,’ we ‘trigger’ a sample or an event and use a ‘controller.’ So let’s move a little bit back in time. A lot of electronic music technology is based on military technologies and its terminology even incorporated bellicose vocabulary that we use to this day. The emergence of Musique Concrète in early 1950s France depends on the development of tape recording technology. It is informed by the worlds of Musique Concrète, where speed and direction variations were combined with creative tape splicing to pioneer new sounds, and Microsound, where computers allow for sound to be divided into pieces smaller than 1/10 of a second and manipulated like sub-atomic particles.” The module is described by the makers as “a next generation Tape and Microsound music module that uses Reels, Splices, and Genes to create new sounds from those that already exist. Tom Erbe is a University of California San Diego (UCSD) computer music professor, and author of the famous Soundhack sound processing software for Mac and PC. Make Noise is the modular synth company from the USA founded by self-taught electronic musical instrument designer Tony Rolando. Morphagene is an Eurorack synthesizer module, a product of collaboration between Make Noise and Tom Erbe. Don’t miss the previous episode, involving the 200-ton, building-sized Telharmonium:Ī giant 1906 machine, and the Eurorack synth module it inspiredĪnd now, in this episode, we get a history of tape and sound -Ed.: The Roots of Morphagene It’s a history lesson slash electronic sounds of the weird slash gear acquisition syndrome all in one. Ukraine’s Oleg Shpudeiko, aka the talented producer Heinali, joins us again, drawing a connecting line from major electronic music history to a Eurorack module from MakeNoise. What connects 1930s Germany, post-War musique concrete, 1980s computer music, and a Eurorack module? Why – tape and microsound! This history explains.
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