In 1995, a string quartet strapped into four helicopters played a synchronized score while rotor noise was mixed live and beamed to a concert hall. This episode explains the mind behind that spectacle, Karlheinz Stockhausen, born in 1928 near Cologne, whose mother was murdered at the Hadamar facility under the Nazi killing of the mentally ill, whose father went missing in action in 1945, and who served as a teenage stretcher bearer before rebuilding music from its atoms.

The hosts walk through the 1950s Cologne studio where Stockhausen generated sine waves, measured tape with a ruler, and spliced it with a razor blade; the spherical auditorium at the 1970 Osaka World's Fair where seven rings of loudspeakers reached an estimated one million listeners; and the 29-year opera cycle Licht built from a single formula and cast with his own childre ...