The Studio for Electroacoustic Music at the Akademie der Künste (academy of arts) in Berlin is a long-running studio for electronic music with a unique history and collection of rare electronic instruments and synths due to its historical roots in East Germany.

If you are a fan of the Synth side of YouTube you might have already come across Hainbach's videos demonstrating some of the studio's rare instrumente like the Subharchord and AMS 3. The studio has also exhibited some of its rare instruments at SuperBooth24 and plans to be back for SB25, so check out their booth if you can make it to SuperBooth next year!

On a recent sunny fall day, Stromkult had the privilege to visit and tour the studio and chat with the studio's current director, Malte Giesen. As a working composer that combines a background in very traditional classical music with a deep passion for the cutting edge of what is possible with electronic sound, Malte has a very unique and deep insight into the current state of electronic music composition and practice.

The following interview is an edited and translated transcript covering a whole range of topics, including the studio's history, the role of electronic music in the GDR, synthesizers as "simulating" instruments, the benefits of creative limitations, the relationship between  electro-acoustic music and ambient, and the current state of generative AI in music production.

Can you start by saying something about the studio's history?

The Electroacoustic studio of the Akademie der Künste is quite unique. We are one of the few electronic music studios that isn’t linked to a formal educational institution. In Germany, the only comparable studios are the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Experimentalstudio in Freiburg — or in Europe in general, the EMS in Stockholm [read the Stromkult interview with EMS director Mats Lindström here]. We have a special history, because it was founded in East Germany, back when there were two separate academies for the West and East. So in the East, at that time there was the idea to create something like what the West had with the Studio WDR in Cologne. Then, when the two academies were merged after the reunification, the studio from the East was carried over into the merged academy. Due to this particular history, the studio today has some unique instruments from the East, like the Subharchord and the AMS 3 modular system.

Today, within the Academy of Arts, the studio helps members of the academy with various music related projects, adding live electronics to concerts, sound installations and so on. Scholarship fellows of the “young academy” can also work here and we run an open call program that is open to a variety of projects, so if you have projects that require a professional studio or that would require you to work with some of the unique historical instruments we have here, you can apply.

How does the studio operate within the academy of arts, which is itself a very old institution, right?

We recently celebrated our 325th anniversary. The academy was founded [in 1696] as the Prussian Academy of the Arts. Today, there are many sections of the academy. As an institution, it is somewhat unique. Its structure somewhat resembles a university, but it’s more like a society where the members decide and the academy operates under its own German federal law, the Akademiegesetz.

Members are elected into the academy by vote. These are lifetime appointments and there can only be up to about 500 members at a given time, so new memberships are only appointed once existing members have passed away. As you might expect, members are usually people with established careers that have already made a name for themselves. In the music section you have people like Arnold Dreyblatt or Christina Kubisch for example, who have also contributed to the direction of the electronic music studio. Aside from helping members of the academy with the realization of projects, we also do various events that are open to the public, which I think is very important.

What was the studio’s relationship with the political establishment in the GDR? As far as I understand, doing electronic music in the East was often rather difficult.

It was indeed somewhat challenging for electronic music — but that was also true for all abstract contemporary music, being a relatively inaccessible art form. In the 1960s, things were more open in that respect, the East tried to keep up with the new technologies and musical developments. But by the 1970s, things became very difficult, as this experimental electronic music was increasingly seen as something that was impossible to present or explain to  “everyday folks”, and so the existing institutions for electronic music were more or less wound down for the time being. That also included the precursor to this studio, which was shut down shortly after the Subharchord was developed [around 1970]. It was a facility at the central broadcast institute in Berlin called the Labor für akustisch-musikalische Grenzprobleme ("laboratory for acoustic-musical edge problems") to which artists from the West were also invited. A very beautiful, fitting name for the GDR (laughs).

So things were difficult for a while, but the situation eventually improved over the course of the 1980s. By the mid-80s the political currents had changed and allowed for a more laissez-faire attitude with respect to the arts. The Electroacoustic studio at the East academic of arts was officially introduced around 1986, although it had already been in use before that. So during the last years of the GDR, shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall, people were able to work relatively freely.

Were there collaborations between the studio and studios in other Eastern Bloc countries?

Yes, there were collaborations, in particular with the radiophonic studios in Warsaw, Bratislava, and Prague. Actually, many of the Eastern Bloc composers that were working with electronic music at that time fell into obscurity for a long time and are only now being rediscovered, and there is a bunch of new musicological research on this musical milieu. There’s still a lot of archival material to be uncovered at the radio institutions, especially in Warsaw or Prague. The studio in Bratislava no longer exists today. There were also studios in Dresden and Munich that no longer exist, as is the case with the Cologne [WDR] studio that is now meant to be rebuilt, at the "center for old music" (laughs). But for a long time, all that equipment was just lying around in a basement at the WDR radio, and nobody knew what to do with it.

Can you say something about the history of the Subharchord?

The Subharchord was developed at the central radio institute (RFZ) in Berlin Adlershof. Oskar Sala, the inventor of the Mixtur-Trautonium, visited the institute and prompted the creation of a similar instrument based on the concepts of subharmonics [hence “Subharchord”] in the GDR. Unlike the Trautonium, it was equipped with a regular keyboard though. It was used to generate sound effects for the radio, but it was also used for very serious chamber music concerts.

I find the mix of old and new technology and instruments in the studio very interesting. Do you think these old instruments hold potential for contemporary music?

That is a very important question I think, the “aging” of electronic music — I don’t think there’s any other genre that “ages” so rapidly. This is also related to the aesthetics of the instruments themselves. Historically, the goal generally was to use electronic instruments to "simulate" already existing sounds. This started already with the first electro-mechanical instruments like the electric organ that aimed to replicate various instruments. This continues through instruments like the Theremin, and then the later analog synthesizers where people realized that if you add or subtract certain frequencies you can “simulate” certain sounds. This is also the case with the Subharchord, which operates like an organ with different registers and has a filterbank with "presets" for various sounds like trumpets or trombones.

These kinds of instruments tend to excel at certain sounds and come with a certain characteristic timbre, but are usually not very good for applications outside of that characteristic range. There’s an interesting lecture by Robert Henke [co-founder of Ableton] called Give Me Limits where he argues, and I agree, that at some point in the mid to late 90s, this historical development more or less came to a conclusion with the computer and the DAW. And suddenly, you are then faced with this kind of unlimited blank slate where theoretically, anything has become possible — which of course can also be great burden, artistically.

And so there’s this turning point, that I think explains the “retro culture” we have now, where we are back to analog hardware, turning knobs, laying cables. Because one wants and needs boundaries and limits to become creative, limits that one can explore and interact with and form a dialogue with, allowing you to form an intimate relationship even with very limited instruments and to develop a characteristic sound.

I think it is an important part of working with electronic music in general that certain instruments and tools excel at certain things and sound a certain way, which also goes for a studio as a whole, which in the end is really also an instrument with a specific timbre. With many of the artists that have worked here in recent years, if you listen to the pieces, you can really hear the timbre of the studio in the music.

Is there an instrument in the studio that people are especially interested in?

The Subharchord is definitely the most requested instrument. For analog setups, people often also bring some of their own gear to combine with what we have. But we also have people who work entirely in the digital realm, programming, working with generative AI and so on. And of course, many projects are hybrid mixes of analog and digital where people choose the best from both worlds.

What is your personal relationship with these older analog instruments?

I myself have a very “digital” background — I studied composition with a focus on computer music. So I come from a school of thought that says you really have to first master the technical side of the tools you are working with, and then you eventually get to the point where you have full control over the process and can do anything you want. So working with these historical instruments and their natural limitations gave me a very different perspective to this idea that the way the process works is that you first develop a very clear idea of what you want to do and then just execute that as technically elaborately as possible using these limitless digital tools.

But of course, you can also deliberately approach things with a limited perspective and limited possibilities and then work on very specific problems within that perspective. And that approach also has a much lower barrier of entry, in that you don’t have to have programming skills or have an audio engineering degree to work with these instruments, you can just try things and see where that leads you.

That said, I don't use these instruments much in my own work, simply because I work quite conceptually, and those concepts are usually easier to realize in the digital realm. But I am always fascinated by what sounds people can draw out of these instruments (laughs).

Do you see a connection between the work of the studio and more popular electronic music scenes?

While the studio’s origin definitely lies in a quite academic tradition, I think today’s electronic music is much more permeable than the contemporary classical world. There’s all these points of contact with different milieus like sound art, visual and media art, the modular scene, the experimental and improvised music scene, and so on. And I think there’s potential in that, to bring people together and recognize that there’s interesting things happening in many different corners, regardless of genre.

I feel like to many people today, even someone like Iannis Xenakis is much more accessible as a point of entry than most traditional classical music.

That’s also because you don’t have this classical instrumentarium where it’s like, this is a piano, this is a violin and this an oboe — and you’re going to have to practice them for twenty years until you can play them well (laughs). Electronic instruments are very personal instruments, everyone has their own setup and then becomes a “virtuoso” on that. That’s very different to the classical world where everything is established and written down and there’s a very fixed pathway for anyone who wants to be in that world.

You also originally studied very traditional classical composition, right?

Yes, my background is very classical, really the traditional Western European music education. I studied the piano for a long time, sang in choirs and then studied proper classical composition where I also wrote string quartets and orchestral pieces. But I already started working with electronics quite early in my studies, doing these hybrid pieces with both classical instruments and live electronics, which is still my focus today. Because I had this realization that if I wanted to make “new music” (Neue Musik), that music just cannot exclusively happen with this classical instrumentation that hasn’t changed or evolved in a hundred years. New music needs new instruments, there’s no other way.

What is your take on the term Neue Musik [the German term for "new music"]?

I think that it is fundamentally a misunderstanding to think of Neue Musik as a genre of music, it’s really a specific context of reception for music. It’s a certain way of thinking music, of engaging very precisely with musical structures and phenomena, listening very attentively, exploring what else is possible with music, what else can be music. Of course that requires a very specific, focused listening environment, and there needs to be a framework to foster that sort of sensitivity for listening.

The concept of Neue Musik seems very German to me, especially with this legal distinction between “serious” and “entertainment” music that no longer exists in most other countries.

There’s definitely a certain historical peculiarity to the idea of Neue Musik with respect to German history. After the second world war, there was this consensus that it was impossible to just continue with where music was in the Third Reich, where it was also misused for political purposes of course. So there was this idea that was needed was a kind of tabula rasa, this radical break.

But I also studied in France for half a year, and there the history of music is told very differently. Because in Germany, there’s this narrative that you have the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Late Romantic, and then — bam! — atonality as this total break. But in France, it’s more of a logical progression from Late Romanticism into Impressionism and then Expressionism. So even today musique contemporaine is something different than Neue Musik. And in the US, New Music is another parallel development that also positioned itself as an antithesis to the strict Serialism of the Darmstadt School with things like Minimal Music. But I think it ultimately all comes from the same impulse, which is to engage very sensitively and intensely with music and sound.

What do you think is the legacy of Serialism today with respect to contemporary music?

It’s certainly no longer about organizing precise rows of twelve tones (laughs). But I think what Serialism brought with it is really this parametric thinking — that each tone has a duration, an amplitude and a pitch — that we still find in electronic music today. That’s still what fascinates me about analog synthesis, how you can create all these very different sounds with just a few components, and with modular synthesis there’s that additional systematic layer where you have to think about what controls what, and so on. So this parametric thinking, that is historically really rooted in Serialism, is still very relevant today, including my own work.

Is your own music based around a written score?

Mostly by necessity, yes, when it has to be performed with classical instruments. But I also have a few purely electroacoustic pieces without a classical score. There is a bit of a tradition of notation for electroacoustic music, but it’s often more of a visualization of what’s happening, similar to what you now see in a DAW with waveform displays and piano rolls and so on.

The thing about a score is that if you’re purely listening to something without a score then you can only experience that in real time — five minutes of listening takes five minutes. But once you represent something graphically, you can get a flat overview of that time and see things that might not be immediately apparent during listening.

Western European classical music of course is focused heavily on the score, where for a long time, there was this idea that the musical work is really the written score and not the music that is actually sounding. For me, a score is really just a tool. When you look at some of the “score-orgies” from the avant-garde music of the 60s, 70s and 80s, you sometimes see two pages of notes followed by five pages of explanations, with everyone inventing their own private form of notation, which can be very challenging to perform. I’m now more in favor of an economy of means.

What’s your take on providing elucidations and explanations during concerts? I feel like with this kind of music, without some kind of explanation, the idea behind the music will often remain opaque to most of the audience, even for those who are well-meaning and interested.

I think it is similar to the situation you also have in the visual arts today, where you often need some form of additional information because nothing is self-evident. And in conceptual art of course, the elucidation can be almost more important than the work — a Duchamp urinal without any sort of explanation is tough (laughs). That’s why we always do lecture concerts where we invite people to talk about their work and share insights about their process.

Would you say your pieces are demanding?

That’s always the question — demanding, for whom? (laughs). But I think I always try to include something that even someone who isn’t deeply into it can find interesting, at least on a sonic level. Something that sounds interesting and makes them want to know more through that joy and fascination with sounds. You don’t have to understand everything immediately, but then you should also feel the impulse to engage with it further.

Earlier, you mentioned that your pieces are often conceptual. What do you mean by that?

My pieces aren’t “conceptual art“ in the strict sense, but they usually have some kind of conceptual basis. For example, I have a piece for orchestra and electronics where the electronic part is just a large multiplication of what’s happening in the orchestra. So there might be something from Beethoven that then gets simultaneously played back eight, or even 1,024 times. But then each of those 1,024 playback layers has a slightly different pitch and speed, which creates all these new sonic layers. That’s the kind of concept that arises out of the music itself, but then can be formalized and programmed.

Do you develop these concepts in advance?

Developing concepts is definitely part of my compositional process. It’s rare for me to work spontaneously and “bottom-up”. It’s more like I start with a core idea that is then unfolded on a variety of different levels.

In popular electronic music you usually see the classic “tinkerer” that just fiddles with knobs until there’s an interesting sound that then may evolve into an idea. So sometimes I feel like having some concepts in advace could help (laughs).

But even in more popular genres, I often see things where I’m like whoah, that’s really astonishing! For instance, with something like Glitchcore, you suddenly find parallels to the musique concrète of the ’50s and ’60s. Or people just move away entirely from danceable tracks and it becomes “ambient”, this very wide label that encompasses many things, but there’s this general acceptance that you don’t need songs, or lyrics, or beats or traditional instruments anymore — so suddenly, there’s this very strong openness to sound. So I do think that ambient can intersect significantly with electroacoustic music, and I try to create some of these connections in my own music.

What does your work with software look like in practice?

When I work with live electronics, there are usually very specific requirements that are best dealt with by programming things myself. It’s not just about effects like adding a reverb here and a delay there, the electronics have a clear compositional function. I’m also doing some experimental generative AI based work, which is very technical and code driven — I’ve worked on projects where it takes 14 hours just to render a sound (laughs). A funny parallel to the old days of scissor and tape editing, where it was also this very long, laborious, non-realtime process. AI work is in a similar phase now. People say that the AI just does everything for you, but getting good results from it does take a lot of time.

Have you played around with commercial generative AI platforms for music like Udio and Suno AI?

I’ve been experimenting a lot with Udio recently. I’ve followed what’s been happening with generative AI over the past few years and text and image generation have been quite capable for a while now, but music was always lagging behind. That has recently changed with tools like Udio and Suno that have really led to an explosive technical development that is capable of producing interesting results.

But you also quickly notice the limitations with that. Instructions regarding instrumentation are just ignored, genre and mood qualifiers work to a certain extent, but as soon as you want more detail, it becomes tough. There’s sometimes also these very bizarre sounding errors, that are also kind of fascinating though. There’s suddenly new kinds of sounds, this kind of morphing sound where it might start sounding realistic but then abruptly switches into something very bizarre and digital sounding. It’s its own new aesthetic, you also see that as something very characteristic in AI image and video generation, that kind of soft washy morphing effect.

It feels like what’s interesting about AI art are usually the mistakes and artifacts that the technology produces more than anything else.

Exactly.

That reminds me of the story behind this album — Blossom by Emptyset — from a few years ago. They were working with generative AI on that and they ran into this problem where the model eventually became “too good”, in that the output became too similar to the output. So they had to intentionally make it worse to get it to sound interesting again (laughs).

There are definitely parallels to early electronic music and the idea of “simulation” here. When the first drum machines came out, people thought, great, now we don’t need drummers anymore (laughs). But then people quickly realized that drum machines are really quite bad at replacing a human drummer, but offer their own unique qualities. I think it’s similar with AI, insofar as at least for now, it doesn’t replace anything, it adds something new. I mean, already in Stockhausen's day in the 50s, there was this idea that with electronic synthesis, you can now just synthesize everything you need in the studio and you longer need real musicians. And that didn't happen either!

I think that ultimately, music is really a human cultural practice. Of course, you can see that with background music, stock music, and so on — that will all likely be replaced in the short term. Everything that is made for an immediate economic purpose will be replaced if using AI is cheaper. Which is perhaps also good news for music in the long run. Because it means that if you want your music to be noticed, you have to be even more original, the music needs even more of a human factor. I’ve heard some avant-garde pieces entirely generated by AI, but then it’s like, you’ve listened to it once and there’s just no more point to it.

What’s next for the studio?

We recently acquired some instruments from the estate of Manuel Göttsching, like the Publison DHM89B2 and the Eko Computerhythm, one of the world's first drum machines. We are also in the process of getting an actual Fairlight CMI. And we’re trying to keep all of these instruments running and playable (laughs)!

You can find out more about Malte Giesen's work over at his website and more about the studio over at the website of the ADK.