With the T9 by Telefunken, 78cm/sec mono, which became available everywhere a few years after the re-introduction of the federal broadcasting system under allied control, the instrument of broadcasting became manageable. Even small reports can now be carefully produced, and thereby the question of censorship is solved almost automatically, the system of social and legal supervision of broadcasting automatically attains material fulfilment in the fact that there now exists a technically perlect instrument of production and pre-recording. Programmes whose main elements are already recorded on tape can be timed and slotted better, running the programme is easier, less complex mechanically, all connecting ideas and conceptual mechanisms which are necessary for the success of live broadcasts in all parts of the production process let themselves be formalized, simplified and institutionalised by quite simple means and measures of qualification.

Broadcasting can thus cast aside its heavy burdens during the first two decades after the war; it turns into a kind of ideal Institution of Further Education for the federally newly grouped population; there is something for everyone - the morning choir is not to be missed, as little as the obligatory school broadcast hour in the morning, the noon concert as little as the swinging melodies to the afternoon tea time dance, after the school broadcast hour is again repeated after lunch. In the early evening, an hour of politics and current affairs, then melodies for a relaxing evening, folksy entertainment, on Saturday the "who-done-it", on Tuesday the discriminating radio drama and otherwise the colourful evening, the radio magazine, the audio-variete with a touch of the exotic from around the world. Later in the evening and at night: literature, culture, essays, on Saturday the opera, and also regularly, the symphony concert.

Broadcasting as a democratic Institution of Education: If from today's perspective one reads the German or Austrian broadcasting programmes during the two decades after 1945, they seem to mirror a sane, orderIy, ideal democracy of communication which radiates like an ideal ordering scheme of the times of the "Economic Miracle". The technical basis of the sequential programming without breaks, of the pre-stabilised picture of harmony, is the quarter-inch tape recorder, which permits the pre-planning and production to a precision of centimetres, i.e. seconds, of programming for days and weeks ahead.

The dual track machine from the middle of the 50's makes the time-multiplex possible: the time phase synchronous stereo cut, accurate to about a tenth of a second. In our broadcasting studios this leads to further optimization of the total running of programming, makes stereophonic sound possible, assists in the success of high fidelity technology which lead to taking for granted a standard of signal/noise ratios lying far beyond the limits of audible perception, and thereby creates tonal quality of presence and immediacy which was previously unheard of - all this leads to an intensification of the effect of radio, which can now claim most intimately to be equally controlled as well as very close to the person. Through the spread of VHF technology, the regional borders and competences are supported and underlined; VHF frequencies have an effective radius of about 80 kilometres around the respective transmitters, so that because of the technology of transmission, the division into provinces of the former radio of greater Germany can now be considered completed, which again appears as a natural result of technical limitations.

But the restorative peacefulness in post war Germany, which had such pleasing effects not only on radio, lasted, as we know, just 20 years. Seen in the terms of the development of production technology taking place in the audio field, the oasis indeed seems programmatically dried up with the appearance of the Beatles. In 1967 they open the age of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" with a four track machine and six painstakingly synchronised Ampex machines, thereby helping to establish a musical breakthrough to a now dominant position, in which music is fully synthetic, that is, made of tracks laid down independently, track by track, instrument by instrument, "Lonely Heart for Lonely Heart" and then mixed by Sergeant Pepper, alias George Martin (the name of the Beatles' producer) to create a sound synthesis which could not be achieved in real time playing. As is well known, "Good Morning, Good Morning" ends with a series of animal voices. John Lennon had the idea "that the following animal should always be one which in nature could threaten or devour the previous one".'"

The multi-track time axis manipulation is a synthetic form of communication which can communicate in music with music but also wilh extramusical sources; it is to the present day the standard of all pop music productions. Therein lies a not unimportant paradox in the history of the media. At just the same time when the western industrial nations from Berkeley to Berlin are trembling through a cultural revolution on whose banners the breaking out to new forms of communication and living together are everywhere written, the same revolutionaries are in all naïveté adherents of music which is already produced by their musical idols through completely synthetic communication machines, e.g. in the multitrack system perfected by the Beatles in 1967. In multitrack production, an essential element of music, namely the simultaneity of tonal action, is dissolved and changed into random algorithms of tracks played on, over, and beside each other. A calculability takes hold, accurate to the millisecond, that arranges soundtracks, envelope patterns, reverberation chambers, overdubs and fill-ins and in the end creates music which can not exist live through playing together.

From 2 to 4, to 8, 16, 24 and up to 48 tracks leads the path on which for example Todd Rundgren in 1974 multiplexes mass singing recorded in two different stadiums in two different cities in America onto one tape of a song, equalizing tonal pitch through a harmonizer, to consequentially announce the "Death of Rock and Roll" on his 1975 album "Initiation".

Mistakenly, as we know: since only two years later, with Punk in 1976, a new aspect of the synthetic communication machines breaks into the open. An artificial pop develops, first underground, then spreading at the beginning of the 80's, which will allow music to be made without playing an instrument, without reading notes. Since the 80's, cheaply available to ABC or Marc Almond, to Yazoo and Depeche Mode are not only pure tonal real time syntheses in the synthesizer, but also tonal real time syntheses of any random stored sounds from a variety of digital sampiers. Whereby we have arrived at the last stage of radio music and at the last stage of recording technology, Rap and HipHop, in which seconds and fractions of seconds of sampled music are sequenced in digital loops and transform into rhythmic, drumming, vibrating material which warps the original source into a sheer endless fury of speech. This is how art and speech enter the ghettos of Oakland, Harlem, or Los Angeles.

This development of radio music has bypassed radio itself. Mechanized communication technology hasn't entered our broadcasting studios at all, if one disregards the few modest multitrack studios which meanwhile exist in some larger institutions. And what for: No studio of the ARD, of the ORF or even of a private radio broadcaster can compete technically with the equipment of even a middie class pop music production studio which can in the meantime be found in every mid-sized city. We are not lacking the money, but the manpower, the necessary division of labour, and therefore access to the production equipment which is essential to pop music. [2]

Therefore: that which meanwhile represents the majority of programming on European radio stations is no longer produced in their studios. I call this the emigration of sounds out of radio. By now this trend has also reached radio drama: Numerous prize-winning radio dramas of the last years, for example Goebbels/Müllers Wolokolamskajer Chaussee were produced not in radio stations but in private studios. What does this mean?

In our networked information and communication world, radio plays an ever decreasing röle in production. It reproduces the recorded audio compositions, but hardly produces them any longer. While TV broadcasting in Europe still maintains at least a small part of the production of that which it lives from: namely of the films that it initiates and finances, radio poses a compietely different picture. Here the popular music stations play what comes out of the music industry. The problem is that precisely these programmes for the masses which are increasingly indistinguishable, enjoy the highest listener ratings, and radio programmes that offer radio in the traditional sense are ever less listened to.