Institute for Music and Acoustics

From 1990 to 2017, the Institute for Music and Acoustics (IMA) provided new impulses to electronic music through its activities in research and development.

For this reason, guest artists were regularly invited to work at the institute and developed new works on site. The IMA hereby acted as work, production, and performance space. The results of the artistic work were regularly made accessible to an interested public in performances, publications, and editions.
 
In addition to live electronics, one of the institute’s main focuses was acousmatic music – which was composed for presentation via loudspeakers either in combination with acoustic instruments or not.

In this case, the computer as a device with programmable and thus changeable attributes was combined with new interfaces to serve as a flexible and open (musical) instrument. At the IMA, investigated in addition to acousmatic music were modern thematic fields, such as sound art, noise, live electronics, 3D-sound, and sound environments, psycho-acoustics, and audio-visuality in addition to the connection of sound and the movement of the human body.

The theme of spatial sound was also an important focus of the IMA. When electronic music began using space, new aesthetic possibilities arose, culminating in the simulation and implementation of acoustic environments. The developments of the IMA team, for example, the Sound Dome and the spatial sound control software Zirkonium, have contributed to advances in this field.

In 2017, the Hertz-Lab was founded in order to meet the requirements of digital society. Its agile structure promotes research and production and continues the activities of the IMA and the Institute for Music and Acoustics in an extended form.