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. 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.