Telemusik

In Telemusik, composed and performed in Japan on commission from NHK, Stockhausen intends to integrate musical elements from various civilizations, from any historical period and any place.

Put like that, one might think this work is a kind of collage, but the resulting sound is far removed from that form. Listening to Telemusik, however, one hears seemingly electronic sound events, difficult to associate with traditional music.
The fact is that here Stockhausen makes extensive use of the ring modulator, a system capable of radically altering the timbre, but also the melody and rhythm of a sound event.

The layman might consider it an extremely controllable "distortion device," which allows for adjustments to various sound parameters based on the waveforms used to modulate the input sound event. Stockhausen uses, for example, rhythmic modulation, in which one piece of music partially takes on the accents and rhythm of another; harmonic modulation, in which an electronic sound moves by interacting with the pitches of recorded music; or amplitude modulation, in which the volume of one piece of music changes according to the amplitude profile of another.

The result is an electronic fresco derived from music from around the world, which, however, are not sensitive as such, but give rise to sounds often imbued with the timbral quality typical of shortwave broadcasts (radio, in fact, uses a similar process).

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