Volker Müller & Co.: Electronic Music and Sound Engineering at the WDR

Abstract

This article is about Volker Müller (b. 1942), a German sound engineer who worked at the WDR Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne for approximately 30 years. I look into Müller’s training as a sound engineer at the Düsseldorf Sound Engineering College and his activities at the WDR studio as a way of expanding on West German post-war state’s building and cybernetics pedagogy. By complicating merely technical, operational and mechanistic views of the sound engineer’s role in the studio, I argue that Volker Müller embodied a particular culture of sound engineering and certain political and artistic utopias that resonate with broader political, economic, and pedagogical structures developed in the context of Cold War.