West German Pavilion

The West German Pavilion, built to Stockhausen's specifications for the 1970 Osaka World's Fair, shows how much electronic music came to be associated with West Germany and the new and innovative techniques the West German electronic music world was taking to create new types of sounds and experiences of sound in space and interacting with space. It was a spherical building with fifty loudspeakers surrounding the audience in all directions, including from beneath the floor. The sound of the performers was manipulated through these speakers, sent in any pattern to give a sense of the music encircling the audience in any direction, or spiraling upwards, or layering. As the author Michael Forsyth describes it, "In Stockhausen's spherical building, the sounds move in space around the listener seated in his chair, giving him a liberated, floating sensation as he perpetually relates to and moves with the sounds; each person is able to relate to a number of different layers of sound at one time. The listener ceases to have a single viewpoint in music- this continually changes, like the different views of a single object in a cubist painting" (Buildings for Music, by Michael Forsyth, page 320; accessed here). Experimentation on such a large scale led to new sensations and a new conception of what music could do as it interacted with space around the listener. That is was called the West German Pavilion shows the attachment between West Germany and their experimental music, that they had created an art form that was distinctly German in its technicality and beauty.
For pictures of the West German Pavilion, see page 323 of Forsyth's book)
Kontakte, part 3, by Stockhausen