Karlheinz Stockhausen
«Study I»

«Study I» (Summer, 1953) is the first composition to use sine tones. The tone colorings for the composition are produced from simple, electro-acoustic materials, whose assembly is determined by the composer. The consciously musical ordering penetrates to the nucleo-acoustic area of sound materials.

Another fundamental method for producing sounds electronically, not based on adding sine waves to ‹stationary sounds› and ‹sound mixing,› relies on dividing ‹white noise.› This requires the use of electric filters which permit a dividing of ‹white noise› into sound waves of any frequency range and density—comparable to a prismatic dividing of white light into bands of color. Because of the lack of differentiated filtering systems, in «Study II» a special process for producing non-stationary sound occurrences was used. This made it possible to include the entire family of sounds in the compositions. Instead of the strangest and most unlikely sounds, sought after even more was the outermost uniformity of sound materials and their form.

(Source: Program WDR Köln «Musik der Zeit», 1954, quote in Karlheinz Stockhausen, Texte, Band 2 (3. unaltered edition), DuMont: Cologne, 1988)