IPEM electronic music studio founded in 1963 as a joint venture between the Belgian Radio and Television broadcasting company and the University of Ghent with the objective of operating as both a creative studio, and a research institution – IPEM continues to this day to research into audio and psychoacoustics. One of the first instruments developed was a sine wave generator by Hubert Vuylsteke. His assistant, an engineer called Walter Landrieu, invented a vacuum tube based instrument called the ‘Melowriter’ in 1976 that allowed the musician to create sounds through an 8bit code typewriter style interface.
470 compositions were realised at IPEM between 1963–1987. It is still operational, housed in the University building in the same place it was founded.
Sources
IPEM: Institute For Psychoacoustics And Electronic Music: 50 years of Electronic And Electroacoustic Music At The Ghent University is published by Metaphon, and comes with 2CDs of music made at the studio between 1963 and 1999. More details on the book here.
The Melowriter was designed and built by Hans Janssens for his MScEE thesis at the Ghent University in 1975-76. Walter Landrieu was the thesis promotor. The purpose of the machine was to enter melody lines in a computer and to play back these melodies. (The Melowriter was not vacuum tube based. It contained more than 100 integrated circuits. It could not be used to create sounds through an 8bit code typewriter style interface.) In 1976-77 the author wrote software to reproduce the music in the form of a plotted score. That same year Koen Uvin used the Melowriter for statistical analysis of various music.