MUSIC

Karlheinz Stockhausen, the 60-year-old West German composer best known for experimenting with electronic music, says he suffers acutely from the noises of daily life and loves silence. “Acoustic pollution is worse than any other kind of poisonous pollution because people don’t know that sound waves immediately change their souls--even sound waves they don’t notice.” He finds no contradiction between his belief that noise harms the soul and his use of radio or car engine sounds and feet shuffling in his compositions. “Any sound can become music if it is related to other sounds. Music is mainly a relationship between sounds rather than an exhibition of sound, but first we need silence in which to put an ensemble of sounds.”