Musicology Annotation << Back Florian Schreiner Dramatische Entwicklungen im Williams Mix Lipov Anatoliy In 1935, Antonin Artaud, founder of the Theatre of Cruelty, developed a four-function installation for the performance of "The Cenci," designed to draw the viewer "into the center of a network of tonic shocks". Four ten-meter loudspeakers, positioned at the cardinal points, created a threedimensional soundscape: the sounds of a bell, a metronome, footsteps, voices, and screams were recorded and played according to a preprepared score. In 1952, composer John Cage, addressing Artaud's concept of cruelty – which signifi es nothing less than a serious approach to life or a reverence for silence – staged the fi rst happening at Black Mountain College, the composition "Williams Mix" (1951–1953), which was a 4-minute electroacoustic composition for eight simultaneously played eight-channel magnetic tapes. Cage embodied Artaud's ideas, developing the concept of surround sound using octagonal magnetic tape, on which eight tracks were created separately and edited until "the medium was completely exhausted," striving for maximum detail and saturation of the sonic space and the collapse of the "stage-auditorium" boundaries. Cage created his fi rst piece of octaphonic music with the assistance of Earl Brown, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, and Bebe and Louis Barron – an ambitious project that involved over 3,000 tape forms mapped onto a 192-page score. "Williams Mix", which was a 4-minute electroacoustic composition for eight simultaneously played eight-channel magnetic tapes.as a "tape collage composed randomly," like Cage's earlier works, was offered to the world in a "permanent form" and aimed to disorient the listener while simultaneously engaging them in a new acoustic mode of perception. This translated academic article analyzes how Artaud's ideas about sound space and viewer engagement became the catalyst for Cage's development of his own sound installations, in the context of the evolution of sound technologies from records and magnetic tapes to modern polyphonic acoustic systems. Keywords: sound experiments, аmerican music, John Cage, tape theater «Williams Mix»,1 musique concrète, noise music, collage, tape music, aleatoric sound, soundscape. DOI: 10.25791/musicology.5.2026.1485 Pp. 03-09.