Pink Floyd's 1967 'Games for May' Concert and the Short Life of the Azimuth Coordinator

The most interesting thing about Pink Floyd’s May 1967 concert at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall isn’t the music—it’s the gadget. That night they debuted the Azimuth Coordinator, a joystick-controlled panning device that let them steer sounds around a custom quadraphonic PA system. The audience sat inside a rotating sound field: vocals, guitar solos, even a helicopter noise would circle the hall. It was thrilling, disorienting, and completely impractical.

The system worked by splitting the band’s output into four channels, each feeding a separate speaker tower placed in the auditorium corners. The band’s road manager, Peter Wynne Wilson, built the controller from an old joystick and some resistors. You’d hear a sound start at the back left, sweep past your ear, and land front right. But the technology was handmade, unreliable, and required constant babysitting—one bad cable and the whole spatial illusion collapsed. After that concert, the Azimuth Coordinator was used only a handful of times before Pink Floyd abandoned it, partly because they became more interested in studio experimentation, and partly because no venue could consistently accommodate the setup. It survives today in recordings like “A Saucerful of Secrets” where they tried to simulate the effect in stereo.