Knut Wiggen

Knut Wiggen (1927-2016) is the foremost computer music pioneer from Scandinavia, and held important positions in the Swedish music community until he resigned from Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in 1975. He changed the concert organization Fylkingen to an avant-garde oriented producer of concerts, conferences and events, with a continual focus on electroacoustic music, and planned, established and developed EMS as the first full-scale hybrid studio on the planet.

A founding idea in Wiggen’s thinking was that new technology and social circumstances required new musical expressions and composition methods in order to not fall into the aesthetics of the past, and he developed the first object-oriented composition program MusicBox fifteen years before similar software was introduced.

Wiggen did not leave much music behind, but published five of the studies he made when testing whether MusicBox could be a functioning software good enough for binding together the essence of the new technology with human cognition and psychology.

These pages sum up Wiggen’s work and achievements, and also provide an overview of the research that has been made on his contributions to the development of electroacoustic music.