(This text is derived from the Institute of Sonology’s Annual Plan 2024–25)
The Institute of Sonology adopts a clear stance in terms of the use of technology in music: technology is not merely an adjunct to the existing music practice, but should be used primarily to explore new forms of composition and public presentation of music and art. At the same time, Sonology is not bound by any stylistic dogmas.
The word ‘sonology’ appears for the first time in an internal report by Gottfried Michael Koenig from June 1965 entitled “The establishment of a laboratory for sonology” that he wrote for the Studio for Electronic Music (STEM) at Utrecht University on their request. Koenig had been appointed artistic director of STEM in 1964 and as its activities began to expand from mainly producing electronic music to related education and research, the university felt it desirable that STEM should be given a name that expressed this diversity.
The name “Institute of Sonology” was officially introduced in October 1967, at the same time as the start of the one-year course in sonology. According to the “Press Release Science Bulletin No. 34” of Utrecht University, 20 August 1976, “[t]he word sonology […] derived from the classical words sonare (sounding) and logos (speaking, calculation, intention).” According to the author of the article, this “expresses three main aspects well: thinking and speaking about the sounding (classifying), calculating the sounding (syntax) and the intention of the sounding (semantics).”
Today, the name sonology is also used in other places in the world for courses dealing with electronic music, computer music and music technology. There is even an Institute of Sonology in Pakistan where training is offered in the field of ultrasonography.
Sonology is neither an artform nor a genre. It is the name of an institute dealing with the production, education and research in the field of electronic music. It is an institute that from the very start has been an umbrella for electronic music produced in studios, music based on field recordings, computer-assisted (instrumental) composition and experimental forms of digital sound synthesis. It is through the advance of the use of technology in all layers of society that connections with other forms of art, systematic musicology and even ethnomusicology have been established almost spontaneously.
The traditional areas covered in Sonology such as studio composition, computer programming, sound research, digital signal processing, algorithmic composition and the theory of electronic music are still strongly represented in the syllabus, but relatively new subjects such as live electronics, free improvisation, sound art, field recording and the spatial aspects of sound have become at least as important. All teachers at Sonology are experts in one or more of these subjects, but none of them teach ‘sonology’.
It is a problem to separate art music from other kinds of music, for instance by the definition of ‘contemporary classical music’ that on the one hand wants to be contemporary but at the same time a part of ‘high culture’. A real contemporary music – electronic and/or instrumental – is a music that starts from first principles and not from idiomatic rules; a music that tries to redefine what music is by making it. A truly contemporary music cannot rely on given premises: of what expressions, what cultures, what concert halls or what audiences are.
Electronic music is something that according to the Institute of Sonology’s definition started in the early 1950s: that is when a music started to being produced that not only made use of technology, but for which the use of technology had an enormous impact on the way that music itself was conceived. Sound from now on was not just an ingredient of music: its production became subject of compositional considerations: composing the music now included the composition of sound itself. Today this development has a history of more or less seventy years, which is extremely short compared to the history of music. This is something to bear in mind when we want to look at possibilities and problems that the future might hold.
Whereas, in those early years, composing electronic music was a musical activity that was only accessible to a very small group of composers and could therefore be considered ‘elitist’, one should not forget their political motivations, especially in Germany and Italy, where electronic music was certainly also a response to the bourgeois music which the regimes during WWII had promoted. And although this early electronic music had not the slightest connection with popular cultures, it was exactly the technological nature of its production methods that would establish this connection in subsequent years, when pop bands discovered the recording studio as a place where music could not only be recorded but also produced from scratch. Modular synthesizers as developed by companies such as Moog and ARP in the 1960s and 1970s are basically hardware realisations of the parameterisation that lies at the foundation of serial thinking. Klaus Schultze and Detroit Techno are therefore offshoots of electronic music.
At the same time, claims by DJs and artists of popular electronic music about the extent to which they are inspired by and build on the work of the pioneers of the 1950s and 60s must be critically examined. Here too lies a task for education, because the arguments often turn out to be superficial.
Today, Sonology’s staff and students are active in realms as diverse as live visual design, site-specific composition, microbial and molecular sonifications, dialogues with musical traditions of different parts of the world, exploration of tuning systems, speculative practices on the relation between the body, the voice and language, and sound perception.
We see a rich mixture of people with backgrounds in academic music, popular music, computer science, sound art, dance, musicology and related fields. Students with a background in popular music are very welcome but should not expect to be taught to write songs or to make pop music recordings: they are invited to expand their view on what music is, or could become, by using technology and experimental approaches to music making.