1. Voices Behind the Glass

The canonical genealogy of electronic music has by now become a well-oiled narrative: Paris and musique concrète, Cologne and Elektronische Musik, with a few offshoots toward Milan, Utrecht, New York. In this account, the voices that speak are almost always the same: major Western technological institutions and a restricted constellation of male names, gradually transformed into nearly mythological figures.

Behind this display window, however, another history unfolds: that of electroacoustic studios born and developed in Eastern Europe and in peripheral contexts, often connected to national radio stations or state academies. These are places where research on sound is conducted under the vigilant eye of the cultural apparatuses of socialist countries, in a delicate balance between artistic experimentation, propaganda, public service, and cultural diplomacy.

Within these technical spaces, halfway between scientific laboratory and aesthetic workshop, a number of women composers also operate—figures who learned to use magnetic tape, sound generators, and mixing consoles to draw unprecedented soundscapes. Their names—Elżbieta Sikora, Ludmila Frajt, Ivana Stefanović, among others—remained outside the manuals for a long time, despite work that exemplary intertwines technology, memory, politics, and gender identity. This short essay seeks to restore their world: not as a marginal curiosity, but as a necessary chapter in the history of European electroacoustic music.

2. State Electricity: Studios, Radio, Academies

In the 1950s and ’60s, the institutionalization of sound research in the countries of the Eastern bloc almost always passed through two channels: national radio stations and music academies or institutes of art sciences. The Studio Eksperymentalne of Polish Radio in Warsaw, founded in 1957, is one of the most significant examples: a relatively small laboratory, yet equipped with up-to-date technology, where composers and technicians worked on tapes, oscillators, and filters, often in close collaboration with radio directors and producers.[1]

Similar centers developed, with different rhythms and modalities, in Belgrade, Moscow, Prague, Budapest. In Yugoslavia, for example, Radio Television Belgrade became, from the 1960s onward, a key site for experiments in applied music, soundtracks, radio art, and mixed works for tape and instruments. In all these contexts, access to the studios was not free: one had to be recognized as an internal professional or a stable collaborator, often after a “classical” academic training that legitimized one’s presence in the technical laboratory.

The electronic music produced in these places was, at least on the surface, fully compatible with the official discourse: experimentation, modernity, technological progress. Yet the very structure of the studios—controlled schedules, centralized equipment, usage logs—meant that every creative gesture was always inscribable within a logic of gentle surveillance: who entered, when, to do what, with which materials. Electricity was state-owned, and those who worked with it did so inside a device that, by its very nature, records and archives everything.

3. Elżbieta Sikora: Wrecks, Specters, Sonic Cities

Elżbieta Sikora was born in 1943 in Lviv, in a territory that over the course of the twentieth century would see its borders and national affiliations change multiple times. She studied composition in Poland and then in Paris, where she came into direct contact with Pierre Schaeffer and François Bayle, absorbing the techniques and philosophy of musique concrète. Yet her work is not a mere French derivation: it is rather the translation of that sonic grammar into a biographical and historical context marked by displacements, traumatic memories, and political tensions.

At the Studio Eksperymentalne in Warsaw, Sikora produced a series of works in which magnetic tape becomes a site of temporal stratification. In pieces such as Hommage à Cage (1976), the explicit reference to the American composer conceals a subtler game: silence, chance, and fragment are not merely aesthetic concepts, but figures within a soundscape in which the background noise of history never fully disappears. In other electroacoustic works, such as Widma (“Specters”), the title itself reveals the horizon: sound is an appearing and disappearing, a wreck that surfaces only to withdraw again.

What strikes one in Sikora’s writing is her ability to use studio tools—editing, layering, filtering—not to construct abstract formal architectures, but to evoke spaces: real and imaginary cities, interiors, devastated landscapes. Electronics become a cartography of memory: reverberations, echoes, distant pulsations take on the role of “sonic characters.” In this sense, her electroacoustic works are less “technological abstractions” and more “acousmatic narratives,” in which the distance between listener and what is heard is always slightly unsettled.

4. Ludmila Frajt: Fragmented Folklore

The story of Ludmila Frajt, a Yugoslav composer born in 1919, opens another trajectory. Trained within the lineage of European modernism, with strong attention to chamber and orchestral music, Frajt encountered the electronic dimension relatively late, when her language was already mature. Her primary interest was not the “purity” of synthetic sound, but the dialogue between it and material inherited from tradition: folk songs, modal formulas, dance rhythms, recognizable melodic gestures.

In the works in which she uses tape, the presence of folklore is never illustrative. There is no exoticism, no didacticism. Rather, traditional material is fragmented, slowed down, overlaid upon itself, at times filtered until it becomes a distant shadow of the original song. The result is a kind of “sonic archaeology”: as if Frajt were excavating the acoustic sediments of collective memory, bringing deformed fragments back to the surface.

In a context such as Yugoslavia’s, where discourse about the people and their traditions is also a political instrument, this operation carries an implicit significance: the “voice of the people” is no longer a compact, reassuring chorus, but a multiplicity of incoherent traces that magnetic tape places side by side without promising synthesis. Electronics, in this case, are not merely a means of updating language; they are a critical tool for interrogating the very idea of national and collective identity.

5. Ivana Stefanović: The Captured Voice

Younger than Frajt, Ivana Stefanović was born in 1948 and established herself primarily from the 1970s onward as a composer associated with Radio Television Belgrade. Her electroacoustic work is characterized by an insistent use of spoken and sung voice, recorded and then manipulated through techniques of editing, transposition, and filtering. In her tapes, language often appears fractured: interrupted phrases, isolated syllables, breaths left in the foreground, as if the microphone were a weapon that captures thought before it can complete itself.

This attention to phonetic detail is never purely experimental. The voice, once separated from the performer’s body, becomes malleable matter—but also vulnerable. Stefanović seems to exploit this vulnerability to construct listening spaces in which human presence is perceived as both close and unreachable. The extreme proximity of the microphone—the amplified breath, the tongue click, the inflection of an accent—coexists with the total distance of the loudspeaker, which returns that voice as a ghostly presence.

In some works, the electronic voice overlaps with acoustic instruments (strings, piano, percussion), creating a hybrid texture: no sound is entirely “natural,” none entirely “artificial.” It is precisely in this intermediate zone that the musical discourse becomes denser: the boundary between subject and device, between identity and technology, is no longer given but continually redefined.

6. Gender and Machine: The Electronic Threshold

To speak of these composers only in terms of “women doing electronics” would be reductive. And yet, to ignore the gender dimension would mean losing an important part of the meaning of their work. In Eastern European electroacoustic studios, as in many other contexts, the majority of active composers are male; technical roles and positions of responsibility are traditionally held by men. To enter that world therefore means, for a woman composer, to cross an additional threshold.

The machine itself—the mixing desk, the oscillator, the noise generator—is charged with a symbolism that, in twentieth-century technical culture, is often associated with male domination over matter. When a woman takes control of it, she does not merely use an instrument: she enters a regime of gestures, habits, and languages that place her in a position of relative exceptionality. The fact that Sikora, Frajt, and Stefanović built a significant part of their output precisely there says much about their determination and their ability to transform a potentially hostile environment into a space of possibility.

The typical stage absence of acousmatic music—no body in the foreground, only loudspeakers—also has ambivalent effects. On the one hand, it may seem that the gender issue dissolves: what matters is the sound, not who produces it. On the other, this very invisibility risks making oblivion easier: if no one sees who is behind the console, names can be erased with even greater ease. The problem, then, is not only to make these works heard, but to restore their connection to the biographies that generated them.

7. Archives, Tapes, Rewritings

Many electroacoustic works produced in Eastern studios have survived in precarious formats: original tapes subject to degradation, copies on second-generation media, sparse or confused documentation. Access to these materials was for a long time mediated by internal radio procedures, incomplete catalogs, and preservation choices dictated more by practical needs than by a conscious cultural project. In this scenario, it is hardly surprising that a significant portion of women composers’ output remained outside international festival and recording circuits.

In recent years, however, a dual movement has emerged. On the one hand, projects of digitization and archival recovery have brought to light works once thought lost or irrelevant; on the other, a changed critical climate—more attentive to issues of gender, geography, center and periphery—has made possible a new contextualization of these works. No longer local curiosities, but crucial testimonies of how electronic modernity also passed through non-Western, non-central, non-male channels.

Festivals dedicated to acousmatic music, specialized labels, and research collectives have begun to include works by Eastern European women composers in their programs and catalogs, placing them alongside the better-known names of the electroacoustic canon. In doing so, the map of contemporary sound expands: it is no longer merely a matter of adding a few new points, but of redrawing lines of force, trajectories, and poles of attraction.

8. Listening Again: Toward a Different Geography

To tell the stories of Elżbieta Sikora, Ludmila Frajt, and Ivana Stefanović is to confront a broader question: how does one construct a history of electronic music that is not simply a chronicle of major Western institutions and their protagonists? One possible answer lies precisely in the notion of geography.

Instead of imagining electroacoustic music as a series of radiating centers (Paris, Cologne, a few other cities), it can be conceived as a network of heterogeneous nodes: state studios, university laboratories, local radio stations, small independent studios. Within this network, Warsaw and Belgrade are not peripheries, but points of passage where electrical current becomes charged with specific histories, memories, and political tensions. The women composers who worked in these places are not footnote exceptions: they are witnesses to a different way of inhabiting the sonic machine.