Recorded Sound in Composition At the start of the 20th century, Thaddeus Cahill’s invention of the Telharmonium inspired many composers and inventors to work on electronic music. An exploration in ‘extra-musical’ sound was begun, with the explorers searching for new sounds and exploiting every available technology for creating a new form of music. New music--employing electronic instruments and unconventional ways of producing musical sound--was soon to be a world-wide phenomenon. The early electronic instruments had many limitations, the least of which was a flatness of tone. Some artists are never satisfied with the means of expression available in their lifetime. Some artists of this sort started to look at the phonograph in a new light 30 years after Edison's first experiments. By varying the speed of the phonograph, any recorded sound from any source could be altered to change the sound’s pitch above and below the instrument’s normal range. The use of recorded sound as a tool of composition would blaze through the established tradition in Western music—creating new forms, new techniques, and vividly painting new soundscapes, fulfilling the visions of earlier composers. The first ‘Laboratory of Sound’ was established by Denis Kaufman in 1916 at the Psychoneurological Institute in St. Petersburg . He used the medical facilities at his disposal to experiment with sound collage, arranging recorded speech in search of new rhythms. He was actually cutting and breaking phonograph discs and reassembling them to create as yet unheard sounds. Kaufman was taking bits of sound and reorganizing them, reorganizing a part of the environment to gain a new perspective. His use of sound reflected the emerging art of cubism which sought to flatten visual space, and he was inspired by the work of the Futurists it Italy. Kaufman's experiments were a look at the past using the human voice, and a glimpse of the future with short bits of recorded sound pieced together. Perhaps influenced by the circular nature of sound recording media, he took the name Dziga Vertov, which implies ‘spinning’.