Werner Meyer-Eppler (30 April 1913 – 8 July 1960), was aBelgian-bornGermanphysicist, experimentalacoustician,phoneticist andinformation theorist.

Meyer-Eppler was born inAntwerp. He studiedmathematics,physics, andchemistry, first at theUniversity of Cologne and then in Bonn, from 1936 until 1939, when he received a doctorate in Physics. From 1942 to 1945 he was a scientific assistant at the Physics Institute of theUniversity of Bonn. From the time of hishabilitation on 16 September 1942, he was also Lecturer in Experimental Physics. After the end of thewar, Meyer-Eppler turned attention increasingly tophonetics andspeech synthesis. In 1947 he was recruited by Paul Menzerath to the faculty of the Phonetic Institute of the University of Bonn, where he became Scientific Assistant on 1 April 1949. During this time, Meyer-Eppler published essays on synthetic language production and presented American inventions like the Coder, theVocoder, theVisible Speech Machine. He contributed to the development of theelectrolarynx, which is still used today for the speech-impaired.^[1][2]

In 1949, Meyer-Eppler published a book promoting the idea of producing music by purely electronic means,^[3] and in 1951 joined the sound engineer/composer Robert Beyer and the composer/musicologist/journalistHerbert Eimert in a successful proposal to theNordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) for the establishment of anelectronic-music studio inCologne. After two years of work, it was officially opened with a broadcast lecture-concert on 26 May 1953, and was to become the most important such studio inEurope.

In 1952, Meyer-Eppler habilitated for the second time, which qualified him for a professorship in phonetics and communication research. At the end of 1957 he was appointed successor to Professor Menzerath, who had died in 1954.^[2] During these years he published and lectured frequently on the subject of electronic music, introducing the term “aleatoric” with respect to concepts of statistical shaping of sounds based on his studies of phonology.^[4] Amongst his students at the University of Bonn in 1954–56 was the composerKarlheinz Stockhausen, who was also working as an assistant in the Cologne electronic music studio, and whose compositions did the most to propagate Meyer-Eppler’s ideas.

In 1959, Meyer-Eppler published his most important work.^[5] He died suddenly inBonn of akidney ailment from which he had been suffering for many years.

• Ring modulator

• Grant, M[orag]. J[osephine]. 2001.Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-80458-2.
• Morawska-Büngeler, Marietta. 1988.Schwingende Elektronen: Eine Dokumentation über das Studio für Elektronische Musik des Westdeutschen Rundfunks in Köln 1951–1986. Cologne-Rodenkirchen: P. J. Tonger Verlag.

Footnotes

• 1913 births
• 1960 deaths
• Acousticians
• 20th-century German physicists
• Academic staff of the University of Bonn
• University of Bonn alumni
• University of Cologne alumni
• Belgian emigrants to Germany

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• Use shortened footnotes from March 2021
• Use dmy dates from March 2021