Hugh Le Caine

Over the next twenty years, he built over twenty-two different new instruments and helped Canadian universities establish their own studios in the new electronic music medium.

One of Le Caine's most notable inventions was the Special Purpose Tape Recorder (later renamed the "Multi-track.").

The subtitle of the piece is "An Étude for Variable Speed Recorder"; Le Caine is acknowledging the musical past with his use of the word étude.

Between 1955 and his retirement from the NRC in 1973, Le Caine produced at least fifteen electroacoustic compositions in order to demonstrate the capabilities of his new devices.

Fortunately, a few people did eventually come into Le Caine's life to make him feel his efforts were of some value.

In the summer of 1958, Tal had travelled to Ottawa under a UNESCO grant to visit major electronic music studios.

[1] In 1962 Le Caine arrived in Jerusalem to install his Creative Tape Recorder in the Centre for Electronic Music in Israel, established by Josef Tal.

After reviewing the resulting recording, Le Caine selected one of the water drops and spliced it onto a short tape loop.

Coming back to the tape recorder, Le Caine used the new tool to perform five kinds of operations or manipulations, all with a different effect.

What we normally experience with amplitude is, for example, pressing a key on a piano, a loud sound emerges then slowly fades away; the second operation's objective is the opposite.

Only twenty-five splices were used to compose the piece, which made him very proud, and the multi-track recorder controlled all other variations.

Dripsody is one of the most frequently played examples of musique concrète, but Le Caine remained modest.