Between 1958 and 1960, three prominent figures of the European post-war musical avant-garde premiered major works for spatially distributed orchestral groups: Pierre Boulez’s Doubles, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen and Carré, and Henri Pousseur’s Rimes pour multiples sources sonores. This period coincides with the introduction of stereo long-playing records that led to the mass distribution of stereo sound technology, buoyed by an aggressive marketing campaign. To what extent were listeners’ experiences of spatialized works like Doubles, Gruppen and Rimes informed by their new familiarity with stereo sound? How did composers respond to listeners’ expectations about, and understanding of, stereo in their spatialized works? This chapter evaluates the extent to which an allusion to the technology of stereophony was inscribed into these works, an inscription that might include both ways audiences were inclined to hear stereophonic effects in these works and composers might have reacted in their works to these expectations.

When stereo LPs were launched in North American and European markets, record companies began a fierce marketing campaign to convince consumers of its merits. Stereo demonstration records played an important role, one of the most notorious being an offering by Concert-Disc that featured the sounds of a ping-pong match. Critics, on the other hand, reinforced a pat narrative about stereophony, seeing its vocation in a single three-dimensional sound image, not in the abrupt antiphony of sonic ping-pong. The term “ping pong” quickly became a critical term of abuse. Thus was born an enduring audio aesthetic for which “ping-pong” effects were to be scrupulously shunned in high-brow offerings, an aesthetic that would go on to infuse the way “serious” music was produced in the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter traces the genealogy and evolution of “ping-pong” sound effects and its relationship to the aesthetics of musical modernism.

Listening to spatialized sound by electronic means was one of the new experiences that awaited listeners in the years following the Second World War. As far as new forms of audiotechnical listening in France goes, one of the stereophonic listening situations that had the greatest impact on audiences was son et lumière, the first of which was presented at the Chambord château in 1952 with music composed by Maurice Jarre. The soundtrack of this show was broadcast via a novel stereophonic setup devised by engineers from French National Radio. These son et lumière shows initiated listeners to new forms of directional listening, a skill that would then be called upon by avant-garde composers. This chapter explores the musical dimension of these son et lumière shows in order to evaluate their impact on the development ofnew forms of listening, ones that would inform the reception of more experimental subsequent offerings.