Closing Thoughts on Ligeti's Experiences in the Electronic Music Studio

It is clearly seen from the above that Ligeti left the electronic music studio because he felt the technology of that time was unsatisfactory for his needs.

Those needs were, and have always been, highly structured, precisely elaborated and very demanding. He has been always very foreign to any aleatoric processes and seemed not at all attracted by the ``happy accident''^1.14 which was (and is?) an often stumbled upon phenomenon in many composers dealings within the technological world.

Because he wanted to preset all aspects of his music first and then to control all facets of its performance, he has been profoundly discouraged by the technological limitations.

It is interesting to denote that while many of the composers with Ligeti among them, were attracted to the electronic music studios because there were a possibility for them to accurately create their music as exactly as they wanted it to be, without the intervening of the performer to ``sonify'' it, Ligeti did not accept to remodel his musical conceptions to fit them in the technological realities of that time.

In this aspect, there is a strong connexion between him and Pierre Boulez in their reasons to depart form the electronic music studios.

More specifically, Ligeti, in his Réflections faites au départ du studio et plus tard[1] first mentions the impossibility to work with (sound) envelopes and attack transients.

Having subtle timbre modifications was also a practical impossibility. The sheer quantity of individual single sine-waves which has to be created, recorded on tapes and mixed for making a complex timbre and its modifications in time was simply not feasible at that ``pre-computer'' time.

He also states another limiting fact which remained with most the electronic music instruments for a very long time. Before the development of Frequency Modulation first and spectral manipulation later, the electronically created sound was, in essence, a static one.

Commonly used voltage controlling devices for pitch (VCO), intensity (VCA) and timbre (VCF) were almost crude and too regular in their periodic oscillations.

Frequency Modulation (FM) technology allowed for the creation of the first electronic timbre which had the capabilities of controlled aperiodic oscillations evolving in a aperiodic manner.

The famous bell sounds of the first commercially available portable synthesizer featuring the FM sound synthesis, Yamaha DX7^TM, were world famous for a reason. They were the first synthetic sounds of the kind.

However the wide timbral capabilities Ligeti was after have been extensively and widely available only with the advent of Physical Modelling^1.15, Granular Synthesis ^1.16 and all the spectral (re)modeling tools we have today. They only flourished starting from the 90's.

Ligeti metions the book The Technology of Computer Music by Max V. Mathews^1.17 and the software Music-V as forerunners of a new area in electronic music composition.

The Music-V system was to give birth to Csound^1.18.