This software simulates a music studio from the late 1950s, providing users with an immersive experience of creating music during that era.
This software is an important milestone for the music industry, specifically during the era between the 1950s to mid 1960s. It was during this time, long before Robert Moog and Wendy Carlos made electronic music core to pop music, that electroacoustic music was established by European radio laboratories and US universities. Composing with tapes and electronics was a serious, painstaking, and expensive task, which was carried out mostly by a restricted elite of contemporary music composers and adventurous sound engineers.
At that time there weren't any electronic musical instruments market and most of the equipment was adapted from scientific tools belonging to radio engineering departments. Sometimes, the equipment was built from scratch by cannibalizing anything that had wires, tubes, and pots. But more rarely, the studios used the few commercial instruments available in those days, such as the Melchord, the Trautonium, and the Theremin.
Contrarily to what happens today, the creation of electronic music was incredibly intricate and time-consuming. A few minutes of electronic composition could take more than a year of work. Everything was handmade, from complex timbres with multiple sine oscillators bounces to tape editing with scissors and scotch-tape. Even sound envelopes were manually built by cutting tapes’ edges at various degrees of inclination. Interestingly, Ussachevsky’s ASDR was yet to be invented!
In conclusion, Berna provides an incredible opportunity to explore serial, concrete and tape music or create strange new sonic worlds with instruments inspired by the greatest studios of the early days of electronic music. So if you want to experience the music production of the early ages, then Berna is the software you’ve been longing for.
Version 1.0: N/A