Gottfried Michael Koenig

From the mid-1960s onward, Gottfried Michael Koenig shaped the growing connection between electronics and music through his work composing and synthesizing sound with computers. Born in 1926 in Magdeburg, Germany, he first studied composition at the Detmold School of Music, then moved to Bonn to explore computer engineering. From 1954 to 1964 he worked at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) electronic music studios in Cologne alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen and fellow composers such as György Ligeti and Mauricio Kagel. His first significant electronic composition, Klangfiguren II, was finished in 1956, and Essay appeared the following year.

Early in the 1960s Koenig began developing Project 1, or PR1, a program intended to generate music automatically through computational processes. When he became creative director of the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht, Holland, in 1964, he brought the software along and completed its final revisions three years later. At the institute he also started working with the Variable Function Generator, an instrument constructed by physics student Stan Templaars that produced sound with circuitry comparable to an analog sequencer. By reconfiguring the VFG as an oscillator, Koenig created the Funktionen series of pieces between 1967 and 1969.

He launched a second software effort, PR2, in 1968, yet its intricate structure limited its practicality, leaving PR1 as his chief tool for computer-based composition. Koenig kept refining PR1 over the next decade; in 1978 he added VOSIM oscillators, resulting in the expanded program PRIX. Further modifications produced the PRIXM version and yielded the 1979 piece Output. After the Institute of Sonology moved to The Hague in 1986, Koenig left his position to devote himself entirely to computer composition and the creation of new music software. He issued the first volume of his theoretical writings, Aesthetic Practice, in 1991.