Werner Meyer-Eppler (30 April 1913 – 8 July 1960), was a Belgian-born German physicist, experimental acoustician, phoneticist and information theorist.
During this time, Meyer-Eppler published essays on synthetic language production and presented American inventions like the Coder, the Vocoder, the Visible Speech Machine.
[1][2] In 1949, Meyer-Eppler published a book promoting the idea of producing music by purely electronic means,[3] and in 1951 joined the sound engineer/composer Robert Beyer and the composer/musicologist/journalist Herbert Eimert in a successful proposal to the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) for the establishment of an electronic-music studio in Cologne.
[2] During these years he published and lectured frequently on the subject of electronic music, introducing the term “aleatoric” with respect to concepts of statistical shaping of sounds based on his studies of phonology.
[4] Amongst his students at the University of Bonn in 1954–56 was the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was also working as an assistant in the Cologne electronic music studio, and whose compositions did the most to propagate Meyer-Eppler’s ideas.