page_title: Oktophonie
section_title: Materials and technique
hierarchical_section_title: Oktophonie / Materials and technique
caption_attribution_description: Yamaha DX7IID (1986)
context_page_description: Oktophonie is a 1991 octophonic electronic-music composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen. A component layer of act 2 of the opera Dienstag aus Licht, it may also be performed as an independent composition. It has a duration of 69 minutes.
context_section_description: Oktophonie was realised in the Studio for Electronic Music of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne, in two phases of work: from 23 August to 30 November 1990, and from 5 to 30 August 1991. Studio collaborators were recording engineers Volker Müller and Daniel Velasco-Schwarzenberger, and recording technician Gertrud Melcher (Stockhausen 1994, O IX, O XIX; Stockhausen 1998, 340). Production was made using a single 24-track tape recorder. A 64-track recorder would have been preferable, or alternatively three synchronisable 24-track recorders, but the WDR studio had only the one machine. Spatialisation was facilitated by the use of a QUEG (Quadrophonic Effect Generator), a device manufactured by EMS in the early 1970s. It was developed by Stockhausen in collaboration with Peter Zinovieff, owner of the firm at that time. Despite having only four outputs, the QUEG could still be used to produce an octophonic output, by manually switching to four outputs, not only between the square on the floor and the one on the ceiling, but between all six squares forming the sides of the cube (Stockhausen 2000, 68–70). A number of synthesizers and modules were used in the production of the sound layers (Stockhausen 1994, O IX, O XIX):
  two Yamaha DX7II-FD synthesizers
  two Casio FZ-1 samplers
  a Roland D-50 synthesizer
  an Oberheim Matrix-1000 synthesizer module (without keyboard)
  an Art Proverb effects unit
  a Roland SDE 2000 reverberation unit
  an SVC 350 vocoder
  an Atari 1040 St computer
  C-Lab Unitor Hardware and Notator Software
  a Yamaha MR 12/4/2 mixing console
  In addition, an EMS Synthi 100 was used for control of the spatialization in some layers during the concluding portion (Stockhausen 1994, O XV–XVI, O XXV–XXVI).
caption: Yamaha DX7-II synthesizer, similar to one of the synthesizers used in producing Oktophonie
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