Origins 1980 —

Origin of the Studio

Cologne

Studio PANaroma is one of the world’s reference centers for Electroacoustic Music. Its origins go back to initiatives by the composer Flo Menezes as early as the mid-1980s. Inspired by the excellence of the Studio für elektronische Musik at the Cologne Academy of Music (Germany), where he specialized in Electronic Composition under the guidance of Hans Ulrich Humpert (who had been Herbert Eimert’s assistant), Menezes envisioned creating a space with international standards of electroacoustic teaching and composition in Brazil, a setting that at the time lacked institutional footing in the field.

USP

The journey, however, was marked by significant challenges. Menezes’s first attempt to found a pioneering studio in Brazil took place at the University of São Paulo (USP) in the 1980s, through an agreement with the German school. The project had the support of eminent figures such as Professor Walter Zanini, then director of ECA/USP, and the then Rector of USP, José Goldenberg. Owing to political problems internal to USP’s Department of Music, the project, though well advanced and with prospects of substantial funding from Germany, did not come to fruition.

1992
2001

A new impulse came with the composer’s return to Brazil in July 1992: working as a Researcher and soon afterwards as a Professor in the Department of Music at Unesp, Flo founded the first studio of its kind in Brazilian universities. In existence since 1993, Studio PANaroma first took the form of an agreement with Faculdade Santa Marcelina (FASM) in São Paulo. In July 1994 its foundation was made official in the Diário Oficial do Estado de São Paulo. The studio, created “from scratch”, soon gained international recognition, and its first production, Parcous de l’Entité by the studio’s founder, was awarded the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. After the agreement ended in 2001, Studio PANaroma became an autonomous institution of Unesp.

2004
2011

At the end of 2004 the studio gained a new home, with ample space of around 170 m² across 3 composition studios and a recording studio, and in 2011 it moved permanently to its new, definitive building in Barra Funda, with 303 m², four composition studios, a recording studio and a main studio equipped, among other things, with 19 loudspeakers [Genelec & MeyerSound], modern interfaces (MADI RME etc.), the KYMA system by Symbolic Sound, the Timax system and many other technological and computing resources, making it one of the most sophisticated electroacoustic music studios in the world.