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The Tokyo studio had no Schaeffer and no Meyer-Eppler of its own — no prophet with a doctrine. It had a special issue of Cologne radio's in-house technical bulletin — articles by Eimert, the engineer Enkel, and the young Stockhausen under one cover — which NHK engineers translated into Japanese and used to build a control room of near-identical specification: a Melochord, a Monochord, a bank of 32 band-pass filters, a ring modulator. And there was a house rule: a composer was allowed at the oscillators only if the finished work would go out on air. The first piece realized here — Minao Shibata's "musique concrète for stereophonic broadcasting" — was twenty minutes of stereo three years before the first stereo records: two tracks ran simultaneously on two NHK AM programs, and the listener placed two radio sets side by side.

They started from borrowed patterns. Toshiro Mayuzumi assembled three études — from pure sine tones modeled on Stockhausen's Studie I to the sawtooth wave of the Monochord with a dedication to Bach — and Makoto Moroi, the only Japanese composer who had seen Cologne with his own eyes, built Shichi no Variations (Variations on 7) together with Mayuzumi: serialism after the pattern of Studie II, with everything ruled by the number seven — pitches, durations, timbres, and seven sections, each twice the length of the last, from 7 to 448 seconds.

The borrowed theory didn't hold for long. Within a year Mayuzumi turned the studio toward material neither Cologne nor Paris possessed: for Aoi no Ue he took a fifteenth-century Noh play — the recitation of Kanze school actors recorded with no processing at all, while the entire accompaniment was synthesized: sine tones stood in for the nōkan flute, band-pass-filtered clicks for the tsuzumi drum. Campanology put the bells of Buddhist temples to work; their drifting sound refused to form a melody, so Mayuzumi cut it into attack and resonance, swapping the halves for synthetic tones and the peal of Western churches. By the 1964 Tokyo Olympics this line had grown into the four-channel Olympic Campanology.

Then in 1966 the studio's director Wataru Uenami invited Stockhausen to Tokyo. In three and a half months he realized Solo and Telemusik here. The second needed a six-track tape recorder, which the NHK team built themselves. Stockhausen didn't mix his recordings of traditional music from Japan, Bali, the Sahara and Hungary — he passed them through a ring modulator, one through another and through electronics, until the sources stopped being recognizable. The piece consists of 32 structures, each opened by a stroke of Japanese temple percussion — the keisu or rin bowls, or the wooden bokusho.

A studio that began by translating someone else's bulletin ended up with the man whose études it had copied coming here to make what he couldn't make at home. Four years later Xenakis would arrive as well — to assemble the twelve-channel Hibiki-Hana-Ma for the eight hundred loudspeakers of the Expo '70 pavilion.