page_title: Alphabet für Liège
section_title: Potential hazards
hierarchical_section_title: Alphabet für Liège / Potential hazards
caption_attribution_description: English: Short-nose Sturgeon (Acipenser brevirostrum) Creator: National Aquarium Source: WO1007-033a Publisher: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Downloaded from [1]; also available from [2]
context_page_description: Alphabet für Liège, for soloists and duos, is a composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and is Work Number 36 in the composer's catalog of works. A performance of it lasts four hours.
  The fundamental idea underlying Alphabet is the notion that sound vibrations can affect both living beings and inanimate matter. There are thirteen scenes, or musical images, each illustrating the physical effects of sound, ranging from making acoustic vibrations visible to a demonstration of Asian mantra techniques. These ideas were developed in conversations with the British biophysicist and lecturer on mystical aspects of sound vibration Jill Purce, who also called Stockhausen's attention to the work of Hans Jenny. In a radio interview three months before the premiere, Stockhausen explained his purpose was to show "how sound waves always change the molecules, even the atoms of a being who listens to music, making them vibrate. And that is what we want to make visible, because most people only believe what they see".
context_section_description: Johannes Kneutgen, who performed situation 11 at the Liège premiere, was a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen, conducting research on the physiological effects of music or rhythm on the body and nervous system. He reported that there was a physical danger in the case of fish: 
   For fish, the change of rhythm can be fatal. Normally fish breathe by opening and closing their gills. The lowest rate to which their gill movement can be reduced and still maintain life is 43 "breaths" per minute. If a clock ticks only 40 times per minute, the fish gill movement slows down too much, and the fish strives convulsively to breathe faster but cannot. It swims rapidly to escape the ticking noise, but if it cannot retreat to a quiet area, it expires. (Anon. 1965)
  Another writer has recalled an "infamous" French series of experiments with a "super-whistle" in the 1960s that demonstrated that very powerful low-frequency sounds (in the 5–8 Hz range) could interfere with the biorhythms of living creatures, to the extent of killing cattle, and warns that Alphabet's situation 9 ("harmonize the seven centres of the body") could prove similarly hazardous if done "scientifically … with physical vibrations coordinated to biological and brain rhythms" (Maconie 2005, 342 & 344).
caption: In situation 11, Dr. Johannes Kneutgen "synchronises sturgeon fish by sound waves, by certain tones in the breathing rhythm, so that the fish move in the rhythm of the music" (Stockhausen and Lichtenfeld 1972).
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