George Orwell BOOK 1949
Orwell's dystopia — included for its treatment of language as an instrument of control.
ORGANIZATION MEMORY LANGUAGE
Library
A growing catalog of texts, recordings, artists, manuals, systems, and other materials used, produced, or recommended by SARC.
From the Library
George Orwell BOOK 1949
Orwell's dystopia — included for its treatment of language as an instrument of control.
ORGANIZATION MEMORY LANGUAGE
George Orwell BOOK 1949
Orwell's dystopia — included for its treatment of language as an instrument of control.
ORGANIZATION MEMORY LANGUAGE
Gordon Pask BOOK 1961
Gordon Pask's early introduction to cybernetics.
CYBERNETICS
Paul Ryan BOOK 1974
Paul Ryan's cybernetic account of media, ecology, and the sacred.
CYBERNETICS ORGANIZATION
Stafford Beer LECTURE 1974
Beer's CBC Massey Lectures analyze why institutions fail through the lens of cybernetics — and how the science of effective organization could be used to redesign them.
CYBERNETICS DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY
PERSON
French composer of slowly evolving electronic and acoustic drone music.
TIME SOUND PERCEPTION
SARC ESSAY 2026
Exploratory Sound Creation and the Trap of Modular Synthesis
The modular synthesizer promises openness but quietly funnels the user into the same few structures — an argument for an instrument whose primary material is relation, difference, and coupling.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS CYBERNETICS FEEDBACK
Iannis Xenakis BOOK 1971
Xenakis on stochastic, set-theoretic, and computational approaches to composition.
NUMBER FORM COMPUTATION SOUND
ORGANIZATION
Composers' collective and publisher of experimental scores, software, and writings.
SOUND ORGANIZATION
Douglas Hofstadter BOOK 1979
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Hofstadter on self-reference, formal systems, and strange loops across logic, art, and music.
NUMBER FORM COMPUTATION
Jacob Klein BOOK 1968
Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra
Jacob Klein on the conceptual origins of algebra in and after Greek mathematics.
NUMBER FORM
ORGANIZATION
Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM)
French institution for musique concrète and electroacoustic research.
SOUND TECHNOLOGY
PERSON
Herbert Brün — placeholder entry; annotation to come.
COMPUTATION SOUND CYBERNETICS
PERSON
Iannis Xenakis — placeholder entry; annotation to come.
NUMBER FORM SOUND COMPUTATION
PERSON
Dutch composer and Institute of Sonology teacher known for feedback-based electronic music.
SOUND FEEDBACK
PERSON
American composer and theorist; work on Gestalt perception of musical form, just intonation, and computer music.
PERCEPTION FORM SOUND TUNING
PERSON
Mathematician; foundational to computing, game theory, and self-reproducing automata.
COMPUTATION NUMBER CYBERNETICS
GROUP
German electronic group foundational to synthpop and electronic music.
SOUND TECHNOLOGY
Krohn-Hite MANUAL
Krohn-Hite 6880A Distortion Analyzer — Maintenance Manual
Maintenance and service documentation for the Krohn-Hite 6880A programmable distortion analyzer — a 64-page scanned manual.
TECHNOLOGY SOUND INSTRUMENTS
PERSON
American composer and pioneer of computer music and algorithmic composition.
COMPUTATION SOUND TIME
GROUP 1978
League of Automatic Music Composers
Pioneering late-1970s Bay Area ensemble performing live music with a network of microcomputers.
COMPUTATION SOUND FEEDBACK
James Tenney BOOK 1988
Meta-Hodos and META Meta-Hodos
Tenney's application of Gestalt perception to musical form — a foundational text for thinking about how listeners organise sound into structure.
PERCEPTION FORM SOUND
PERSON
Free-jazz percussionist and researcher into rhythm, the heartbeat, and the body.
SOUND PERCEPTION FEEDBACK
GROUP
Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company
Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company — placeholder entry; annotation to come.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
GROUP
Musica Elettronica Viva — placeholder entry; annotation to come.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
David Tudor COMPOSITION 1992
David Tudor's late live-electronic work built from feedback networks.
FEEDBACK INSTRUMENTS SOUND
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson BOOK 1917
D'Arcy Thompson's classic on the mathematics and physics of biological form.
MORPHOGENESIS FORM NUMBER
PERSON
Pauline Oliveros — placeholder entry; annotation to come.
PERCEPTION SOUND TIME
Michael Stearns RELEASE 1981
Michael Stearns' 1981 analog space-music album.
SOUND SPACE
You Nakai BOOK 2021
Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor's Music
You Nakai's study of David Tudor reconstructed through his instruments and circuits.
INSTRUMENTS SOUND FEEDBACK
PERSON
Composer and designer of the Serge modular synthesizer.
INSTRUMENTS TECHNOLOGY SOUND
Gordon Pask ESSAY 1969
The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics
Pask's argument for cybernetics as a theory of architecture and interaction.
CYBERNETICS ORGANIZATION
Edward Tufte BOOK 1983
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Tufte on the principled graphical display of data.
FORM NUMBER PERCEPTION
GROUP
British industrial group pioneering tape, electronics, and confrontational performance.
SOUND TECHNOLOGY
Valentino Braitenberg BOOK 1984
Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology
Braitenberg's thought experiments in which simple sensorimotor machines produce lifelike behavior — a foundational text on emergence from minimal parts.
CYBERNETICS PERCEPTION COMPUTATION
GROUP
Swiss duo (Andy Guhl and Norbert Möslang) performing with cracked everyday electronics.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
Iannis Xenakis COMPOSITION 1989
Voyage absolu des Unari vers Andromède
Electroacoustic work by Iannis Xenakis.
NUMBER SOUND COMPUTATION
Xenharmonic community WEBSITE
A deep reference for microtonal music — tunings, temperaments, scales, notation.
NUMBER TUNING SOUND