EMS, Elektronmusikstudion (Stockholm, 1964)

EMS (Elektronmusikstudion, the Electronic Music Studio) is Sweden's centre for electroacoustic music and sound art, in Stockholm. It was set up at the national broadcaster Sveriges Radio in 1964, pushed by the radio's head of music, the composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl, and its first director was Knut Wiggen.^1, 2

A tape studio first

Wiggen, who also chaired the music society Fylkingen, had built a small studio at the Workers' Educational Association (ABF) in 1961. EMS opened with a conventional studio for composing on analogue tape, a workspace while the real project was built.³ It was in Sveriges Radio's old radio-theatre rooms on Kungsgatan, and the tape studio was called Klangverkstaden, "the sound workshop".⁴

The hybrid studio

The real project was a studio of analogue sound equipment under the control of a computer. Most of it was ready in 1966. The composer played it from a control console about nine metres long, on which every parameter of the equipment was laid out, and switched values on and off by touching the surface with a copper brush.^3, 5 EMS tested a computer at Stockholm University in 1968 and then bought its own, a PDP-15; it arrived in 1970.^3, 1

The computer was too slow to calculate control signals while the music played, so they were stored on digital magnetic tape and played back from it. Composers typed their pieces on teleprinters that punched paper tape, in the language EMS-1, written by a team at Uppsala University and finished in spring 1972. James Beauchamp's comparison of synthesis systems in 1973 called EMS "probably the most powerful system in the world to be placed for the exclusive use of composers on a 24 hour basis".³ Jan W. Morthenson found it "very cumbersome for making a single sound", because it was a hybrid studio.⁶

Composers against the plan

Composers meanwhile made pieces with what there was. Morthenson brought the sounds for Neutron Star (1967), computed on a power company's Datasaab D21, to EMS and made the piece there.^6, 5 According to Lars-Gunnar Bodin, Wiggen told some of them to stop composing until his system was ready.⁴ By the early 1970s EMS had lost its place as Sveriges Radio's major development project. A new board, with several composers on it, wanted less research and more help with composers' immediate needs, and the text-sound composers wanted the money to go to the tape studio. Wiggen resigned in 1975.³

After Wiggen

Bodin tells what followed. A state inquiry of 1977 proposed closing EMS and moving its equipment, the computer included, to the Royal College of Music. Bodin ran the studio unofficially from 1977 and applied for the post in 1979, when the ministry let EMS go on.⁴ EMS left Kungsgatan in 1985, by Bodin's account, for purpose-built rooms on Söder Mälarstrand.^4, 7 It is there today, at number 61, as part of the state agency Statens musikverk. Its seven studios are open around the clock all year, to several hundred Swedish and visiting composers and sound artists a year.²

How the computers Swedish composers used in the 1960s were borrowed, mostly from industry, is told in Datasaab and Swedish computer art and Computer Art in Sweden.