The invention and wide adoption of magnetic tape as a medium for the recording of audio signals provided a breakthrough for composers waiting to compose purely with _sound_. In the early postwar period, the first electronic music studios flourished at radio stations in Paris (ORTF) and Cologne (WDR). The composers at the Paris studio, most notably Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, developed the early compositional technique of _musique concrète_, working directly with recordings of sound on phonographs and magnetic tape to construct compositions through a process akin to what we would now recognize as sampling. Schaeffer's _Étude aux chemins de fer_ (1948) and Henry and Schaeffer's _Symphonie pour un homme seul_ are classics of the genre. Meanwhile, in Cologne, composers such as Herbert Eimart and Karlheinz Stockhausen were investigating the use of electromechanical oscillators to produce pure sound waves that could be mixed and sequenced with a high degree of precision. This classic _elektronische music_ was closely tied to the serial techniques of the contemporary modernist avant-garde, who were particularly well suited aesthetically to become crucial advocates for the formal quantification and automation offered by electronic and, later, computer music.[^4] The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, founded by Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, Milton Babbitt, and Roger Sessions in New York in 1957, staked its reputation on the massive RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer, a room-sized machine capable of producing and sequencing electronically generated tones with an unprecedented degree of precision and control. In the realm of popular music, pioneering steps were taken in the field of recording engineering, such as the invention of multitrack tape recording by the guitarist Les Paul in 1954. This technology, enabling a single performer to “overdub” her/himself onto multiple individual “tracks” that could later be mixed into a composite, filled a crucial gap in the technology of recording and would empower the incredible boom in recording-studio experimentation that permanently cemented the commercial viability of the studio recording in popular music.
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