17/08/2026
At N**E, we have a soft spot for old photographs of studios... They capture that meeting point between human curiosity, technology and the desire to listen carefully... and at N**E // WE LOVE LISTENING //
We found this picture on a site that colourises old black-and-white photographs from across different industries...It's the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. Founded in Warsaw in 1957, Studio Eksperymentalne Polskiego Radia became one of Europe’s earliest centres for electronic and electroacoustic music and a rare island of artistic freedom behind the Iron Curtain... At its heart was the pictured 6 × 6-metre “Black Room,” designed so composers and engineers could actively modify the physical architecture of the studio. Its walls featured rotating panels that were reflective on one side and sound-absorbing on the other, allowing the room’s reverberation time to be altered physically.... work was "contsructed:" with oscillators, filters, tape loops and razor-blade edits long before plug-ins, presets or an Undo button... One of the studio’s earliest works was Włodzimierz Kotoński’s Study for One Cymbal Stroke... which began with exactly that: a single recorded cymbal strike, transformed and reassembled into an entire composition.