Microstoria, Markus Popp ALBUM 1996
Microstoria's 1996 album of understated, organic-sounding ambient electronics.
SOUND
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Microstoria, Markus Popp ALBUM 1996
Microstoria's 1996 album of understated, organic-sounding ambient electronics.
SOUND
George Orwell BOOK 1949
Orwell's dystopia — included for its treatment of language as an instrument of control.
MEMORY LANGUAGE
Throbbing Gristle ALBUM 1979
Throbbing Gristle's 1979 album, its cover parodying easy-listening compilations while the music undercuts the joke.
SOUND
Pete Namlook, Tetsu Inoue ALBUM 1995
Self-titled 1995 ambient collaboration between Pete Namlook and Tetsu Inoue.
SOUND SPACE
Pauline Oliveros COMPOSITION
Pauline Oliveros piece documenting her early electronic work at UCSD, 1967-1970.
SOUND FEEDBACK
Hans Kulk ALBUM 1989
A Selection of Improvisations (1989-2017)
Hans Kulk's revised-edition compilation of nearly three decades of personal analog synthesizer improvisations.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
American noise musician, member of Wolf Eyes from 1998 to 2005, founder of Hanson Records.
SOUND FEEDBACK
CONCEPT
Building a complex timbre by summing simple waveforms, typically sine tones, at chosen amplitudes.
COMPUTATION SOUND
Éliane Radigue ALBUM 1974
Éliane Radigue's slowly unfolding drone cycle (Adnos I–III).
SOUND TIME PERCEPTION
Roger Linn, Dave Smith, Tom Oberheim HARDWARE
Digital multi-effects unit combining a drum machine and amp modeler, designed by Roger Linn with Dave Smith and Tom Oberheim.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Roger Linn, Akai INSTRUMENT 1988
1988 integrated sampler, drum machine, and MIDI sequencer designed by Roger Linn for Akai, foundational to hip-hop production.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS COMPUTATION
Mathematician and father of theoretical computer science.
COMPUTATION NUMBER MORPHOGENESIS
American saxophonist; central figure in free jazz, known for raw tone and collective improvisation.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Lejaren Hiller CONCEPT
Composing via algorithms or formal rule systems, from computer-generated scores to live coding.
SOUND COMPUTATION FORM
American composer exploring acoustic phenomena, resonance, and the physics of sound in space.
SOUND PERCEPTION SPACE
Brian Eno ALBUM 1982
Brian Eno's 1982 album of remembered and imagined landscapes, the fourth in his Ambient series.
SOUND SPACE MEMORY
John Olson ORGANIZATION
John Olson's Detroit noise/drone cassette label, founded 1991, known for elaborate handmade packaging.
SOUND
American free-jazz drummer known for his work with Cecil Taylor and his own long solo and duo practice.
SOUND TIME
Yevgeny Murzin INSTRUMENT
A Soviet photoelectronic instrument that generates sound by scratching microtonal tracks directly onto rotating glass discs, read optically.
SOUND COMPUTATION
Alan R. Pearlman, ARP Instruments INSTRUMENT
ARP's first synthesizer, introduced in 1970 and notable for its pitch stability.
INSTRUMENTS
Alan R. Pearlman, Dennis Colin, ARP Instruments INSTRUMENT
ARP's 1971 semi-modular synthesizer, successor to the 2500.
INSTRUMENTS
Alan R. Pearlman ORGANIZATION
American synthesizer manufacturer founded by Alan R. Pearlman, active 1969–1981.
INSTRUMENTS
Sonny Sharrock, Pharoah Sanders, Bill Laswell ALBUM 1991
Sonny Sharrock's 1991 album with Pharoah Sanders, Charnett Moffett, and Elvin Jones, produced by Bill Laswell.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS TIME
German electronic music pioneer, active in Hamburg since the mid-1960s, pursuing rigorous 'absolute music' through musique concrète and synthesis.
SOUND FORM
Akifumi Nakajima
Akifumi Nakajima's Kyoto noise project, each record built by processing a single manipulated sound source.
SOUND
ORGANIZATION
British embedded audio platform maker, founded 2016 from Queen Mary University of London research.
INSTRUMENTS
Robert Ashley ALBUM 1979
Robert Ashley's 1979 album exploring involuntary speech and Tourette's syndrome through electronics.
SOUND TIME LANGUAGE
Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela CONCEPT
A system that produces and maintains itself by continuously creating its own component parts — Maturana and Varela's 1972 term for the self-organization of living systems.
CYBERNETICS FEEDBACK
Takashi Sekiguchi ALBUM
Takashi Sekiguchi's album exploring bamboo and Asian wind instruments.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Canadian composer, World Soundscape Project member, and pioneer of real-time granular synthesis.
SOUND COMPUTATION SPACE
Desmond Briscoe, Daphne Oram, Desmond Briscoe ORGANIZATION
BBC department for electronic sound and music, founded 1958 at Maida Vale Studios.
SOUND
BeagleBoard.org Foundation HARDWARE
Open-source single-board computer that the original Bela platform was built on.
INSTRUMENTS
Wendy Carlos ALBUM 1986
Wendy Carlos's 1986 album exploring alternative tunings and scales built from scratch.
SOUND TUNING
Augmented Instruments HARDWARE
Ultra-low-latency embedded audio and sensor platform, built on the BeagleBone Black.
INSTRUMENTS
Augmented Instruments HARDWARE
2025 stereo audio/sensor add-on board for the PocketBeagle 2, successor to the original Bela.
INSTRUMENTS
Augmented Instruments HARDWARE
10-in/10-out variant of Bela Gem, for more complex multichannel audio projects.
INSTRUMENTS
ORGANIZATION
American research laboratory where Max Mathews developed the first computer music software.
COMPUTATION SOUND INSTRUMENTS
French composer of musique concrète and acousmatic sound.
SOUND PERCEPTION
American bassist, producer, and prolific collaborator across free jazz, dub, ambient, and experimental studio production.
SOUND
David Rosenboom BOOK 1976
Biofeedback and the Arts: Results of Early Experiments
David Rosenboom's edited collection documenting early experiments in biofeedback and creative practice.
FEEDBACK PERCEPTION SOUND
Heinz von Foerster, Heinz von Foerster ORGANIZATION
Biological Computer Laboratory
University of Illinois research center, founded 1958 by Heinz von Foerster, central to second-order cybernetics.
CYBERNETICS COMPUTATION PERCEPTION
Miles Davis ALBUM 1970
Miles Davis's 1970 double album, a foundational fusion of jazz improvisation with electric instruments and studio editing.
SOUND TIME
John Blacet ORGANIZATION
Frac Rack-format modular synthesizer manufacturer founded by John Blacet in 1978, serving the DIY electronic music community.
INSTRUMENTS
Delia Derbyshire COMPOSITION 1967
Delia Derbyshire's 1967 BBC Radiophonic Workshop piece built from a struck lampshade and re-synthesized voice.
SOUND
Don Dietrich, Jim Sauter, Donald Miller 1979
New York free-jazz/noise trio formed 1979, known for overwhelming volume and saxophones played bell-to-bell.
SOUND FEEDBACK
Stafford Beer BOOK 1972
Stafford Beer's 1972 book introducing the Viable System Model, mapping organizational structure onto the human nervous system.
CYBERNETICS FEEDBACK
David Rosenboom ALBUM 1975
David Rosenboom's 1975 biofeedback-driven electronic music, expanded and reissued by Black Truffle in 2019.
SOUND FEEDBACK PERCEPTION
PLACE
Bregman Electronic Music Studio
Dartmouth College's electronic music studio, directed by Jon Appleton, where the Synclavier was later developed.
SOUND
British musician and originator of ambient and generative music.
SOUND FEEDBACK
Gary Mundy ORGANIZATION
UK power electronics label founded by Gary Mundy of Ramleh in the mid-1980s.
SOUND
Don Buchla, Buchla & Associates INSTRUMENT
Don Buchla's modular voltage-controlled synthesizer, commissioned by the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the early 1960s.
INSTRUMENTS
LANGUAGE
General-purpose programming language, developed at Bell Labs in the early 1970s.
COMPUTATION
LANGUAGE
General-purpose programming language extending C with object-oriented features.
COMPUTATION
German artist and musician, recording as Alva Noto; founder of Noton and co-founder of Raster-Noton.
SOUND
ORGANIZATION
Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, founded 1974.
COMPUTATION SOUND
American pianist and poet, a founding figure of free jazz's percussive, dense keyboard language.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam, John Conway CONCEPT
A grid of cells, each in one of a small set of states, updated all at once by a simple local rule — from which strikingly complex global behavior can emerge.
COMPUTATION
Iannis Xenakis ORGANIZATION
Iannis Xenakis's Paris research center for music and mathematics, formalized 1972, birthplace of the UPIC system.
SOUND COMPUTATION NUMBER
Merrill Ellis ORGANIZATION
Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia (CEMI)
University of North Texas center, founded 1963 as the Electronic Music Center by Merrill Ellis.
SOUND
Yoshiki Kuramoto, Dorjsuren Battogtokh CONCEPT
A pattern in a network of identical, coupled oscillators where one group locks into synchrony while another remains incoherent — impossible under purely local or purely global coupling.
DYNAMICS
British musician and electronics designer, founding member of Throbbing Gristle and inventor of the Gristleizer.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
American computer scientist and founder of the field of artificial life.
COMPUTATION DYNAMICS MORPHOGENESIS
Japanese composer and industrial musician; longtime film composer for Shinya Tsukamoto.
SOUND
Bill Laswell, Coil, Tetsu Inoue ALBUM 1997
Bill Laswell's 1997 album, featuring a 13-minute Coil composition among its collaborators.
SOUND
Alberto Ginastera, Alberto Ginastera ORGANIZATION
Latin American composition institute at Buenos Aires's Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, founded 1962 by Alberto Ginastera.
SOUND
Pierre Schaeffer ORGANIZATION
Paris radio research club, renamed from the Studio d'Essai in 1946, where Pierre Schaeffer began musique concrète.
SOUND
Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius
German electronic duo central to krautrock and ambient electronics.
SOUND
F. Richard Moore LANGUAGE
A MUSIC-N-descended computer music language written in C by F. Richard Moore at UCSD.
COMPUTATION SOUND
Richard Felciano, David Wessel ORGANIZATION
UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, founded 1989, co-developer of Open Sound Control.
SOUND COMPUTATION PERCEPTION
John Balance, Peter Christopherson
British experimental group formed by John Balance and Peter Christopherson in 1984, exploring the occult and dark ambient.
SOUND FEEDBACK
Brad Garton ORGANIZATION
Columbia University Computer Music Center
Renamed in 1996 from the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, continuing as Columbia's computer music research center.
SOUND COMPUTATION
Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, Milton Babbitt, Roger Sessions, Vladimir Ussachevsky ORGANIZATION
Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center
Joint Columbia/Princeton studio founded 1958-59 around the RCA Mark II synthesizer, the oldest electroacoustic music center in the US.
SOUND
David Tudor, John Driscoll, Paul DeMarinis, Phil Edelstein, Linda Fisher, Ralph Jones, Martin Kalve, Bill Viola
David Tudor's live-electronics ensemble, formed 1973 to collaboratively realize Rainforest IV.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
CONCEPT
Music composed or generated with the aid of computation, from the earliest MUSIC-N software onward.
COMPUTATION SOUND
Conrad Schnitzler ALBUM 1978
Conrad Schnitzler's electronic work of restless synthetic textures.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Iannis Xenakis COMPOSITION 1958
Electroacoustic music composed by Iannis Xenakis for the Philips Pavilion he designed for Expo 58.
NUMBER SOUND
Prolific German electronic musician and Kluster co-founder.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
British musician and artist (b. Christine Newby), founding member of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Buckminster Fuller BOOK 1981
Buckminster Fuller's synthesis of design science, resources, and the trajectory of humanity.
FORM
Barry Vercoe SOFTWARE
Barry Vercoe's 1985 sound synthesis programming language, descended from the MUSIC-N lineage.
COMPUTATION SOUND
American composer and researcher who first programmed Xenakis's theory of granular synthesis, later formalizing it in Microsound.
COMPUTATION SOUND TIME
Stafford Beer BOOK 1959
Stafford Beer's 1959 book founding management cybernetics, the application of cybernetic principles to organizations.
CYBERNETICS
ORGANIZATION
American software company, founded 1997 by David Zicarelli to continue commercial development of Max.
COMPUTATION SOUND
Hans Jenny FILM 1967
Hans Jenny's films making sound visible as form in vibrating matter.
SOUND FORM MORPHOGENESIS
Hans Jenny BOOK 2001
Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomena and Vibration
Hans Jenny's study of periodic vibrational phenomena, illustrated with his own experiments in visible sound.
SOUND FORM MORPHOGENESIS
Scottish biologist and mathematician; On Growth and Form pioneered the mathematical study of biological pattern.
MORPHOGENESIS FORM NUMBER
Else Marie Pade ORGANIZATION
Danish Radio Electronic Music Studio
Informal studio Else Marie Pade organized at Danmarks Radio in the late 1950s.
SOUND
Derek Bailey, Jamie Muir ALBUM 1981
1981 duo album by Derek Bailey and Jamie Muir, recorded at Crane Grove, London.
SOUND
American engineer, founder of E-mu Systems and pioneer of sampling instrument design.
INSTRUMENTS
American engineer, founder of Sequential, designer of the Prophet-5, and driving force behind the MIDI specification.
INSTRUMENTS
American composer, co-founder of the Sonic Arts Union, and Columbia Records producer of the 'Music of Our Time' series.
SOUND FEEDBACK COMPUTATION
American composer, founder of Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company, one of the first ensembles to perform live on synthesizers.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
American composer and bioacoustician working at the intersection of music, language, and environment.
SOUND PERCEPTION CYBERNETICS
German mathematician who defended and axiomatized Cantorian set theory and posed the Entscheidungsproblem.
NUMBER FORM COMPUTATION
American composer and pioneer of biofeedback and brainwave music, longtime Dean of Music at CalArts.
SOUND FEEDBACK PERCEPTION
Pianist turned live-electronics pioneer; Rainforest and feedback instruments.
INSTRUMENTS SOUND FEEDBACK
Bernard Parmegiani ALBUM 1975
Bernard Parmegiani's 1975 cycle of twelve electroacoustic studies on the nature of sound.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Digital Equipment Corporation HARDWARE
Digital Equipment Corporation mainframe used across early computer music research, including at Stanford's CCRMA.
COMPUTATION
British composer and BBC Radiophonic Workshop pioneer of musique concrète and electronic sound.
SOUND TIME
Virgin Islands-born drummer whose loose, melodic pulse shaped early free jazz.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS TIME
English guitarist central to free improvisation and non-idiomatic playing.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Terry Riley ALBUM 1982
Descending Moonshine Dervishes
Terry Riley's 1982 album of just-intonation electric organ improvisation.
SOUND TIME TUNING
Steve Roach, Kevin Braheny, Michael Stearns ALBUM 1989
1989 ambient collaboration between Steve Roach, Kevin Braheny, and Michael Stearns, evoking the American desert Southwest.
SOUND SPACE TIME
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 DYNAMICS
Swiss-born German electronic musician, co-founder of Kluster, Cluster, and Harmonia.
SOUND
CONCEPT
Recording and digitally storing a sound for playback, pitch-shifting, and manipulation.
COMPUTATION SOUND MEMORY
PROTOCOL
A hardware clock and start/stop protocol for synchronizing drum machines and sequencers, carried over a DIN connector.
INSTRUMENTS TIME
American instrument designer, co-inventor of the voltage-controlled modular synthesizer.
INSTRUMENTS
American trumpeter central to free jazz, known for the pocket trumpet and world-music fusion.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
American pianist and organist central to free jazz, known for percussive clusters and rolling-forearm technique.
SOUND TIME
American cognitive scientist; author of Gödel, Escher, Bach.
NUMBER FORM COMPUTATION
Rashied Ali, Frank Lowe ALBUM 2020
Duo Exchange: Complete Sessions
2020 expanded reissue of Rashied Ali and Frank Lowe's 1972 free-jazz duo sessions, Survival Records' inaugural release.
SOUND TIME
Dave Rossum ORGANIZATION
American sampling instrument manufacturer founded by Dave Rossum.
INSTRUMENTS
American jazz drummer known for his work with Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, bringing New Orleans rhythm into free jazz.
SOUND TIME
British percussionist, co-founder of AMM, and founder of Matchless Recordings.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Russian electronic and film composer, best known for scoring Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, The Mirror, and Stalker.
SOUND TIME
American statistician and political scientist; self-published The Visual Display of Quantitative Information after publishers declined it.
FORM PERCEPTION NUMBER
Tod Dockstader ALBUM 1961
Tod Dockstader's self-produced 1961 debut, built after-hours at a New York radio station without institutional support.
SOUND
Peter Zinovieff, David Cockerell, Tristram Cary ORGANIZATION
Electronic Music Studios (EMS)
British synthesizer manufacturer, founded 1969, maker of the VCS3 and Synthi 100.
INSTRUMENTS
Knut Wiggen, Knut Wiggen ORGANIZATION
Swedish national electronic music studio founded 1964 in Stockholm — distinct from the British synthesizer manufacturer of the same acronym.
SOUND COMPUTATION
French composer of slowly evolving electronic and acoustic drone music.
TIME SOUND PERCEPTION
Danish composer; the first Danish composer of electronic and concrete music.
SOUND TIME
PLACE
Peter Zinovieff's home studio in Putney, London, founded 1965, running the MUSYS computer music system.
SOUND COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
David Cockerell, EMS INSTRUMENT
EMS's large-format 1971 synthesizer, produced in only 30 units.
INSTRUMENTS
David Cockerell, EMS INSTRUMENT
EMS's 1971 portable synthesizer, the VCS3 circuit repackaged into a briefcase — not the large-format Synthi 100.
INSTRUMENTS
EMS INSTRUMENT
Portable EMS synthesizer combining the VCS3 circuit with a built-in sequencer and touch keyboard.
INSTRUMENTS
Peter Zinovieff, David Cockerell, EMS INSTRUMENT
EMS's 1969 portable synthesizer, among the first commercially available.
INSTRUMENTS
Italian composer, best known for film scoring, and a member of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.
SOUND FEEDBACK
ORGANIZATION
American synthesizer manufacturer founded by former Commodore SID-chip engineers, in Malvern, Pennsylvania, in 1982.
INSTRUMENTS
Ensoniq INSTRUMENT
Ensoniq's 1986 hybrid synthesizer/sequencer — digital wavetable oscillators through analog filters, multitimbral, and affordable.
COMPUTATION SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Ensoniq INSTRUMENT
Ensoniq's 1984 sampling keyboard, priced an order of magnitude below the Fairlight and Emulator, that made digital sampling affordable.
COMPUTATION SOUND MEMORY INSTRUMENTS
Ludwig Boltzmann, Claude Shannon CONCEPT
A measure of disorder or uncertainty — Boltzmann's statistical-mechanical quantity, and Shannon's 1948 measure of information.
CYBERNETICS COMPUTATION
Jean Schwarz ALBUM 1972
Jean Schwarz's electroacoustic pieces Erda (1972) and Suite N (1982), reissued together by Recollection GRM.
SOUND SPACE
Finnish inventor and composer; built the University of Helsinki's electronic music studio and the DIMI series of instruments.
INSTRUMENTS
PLACE
IRCAM's variable-acoustic concert hall, designed by Renzo Piano.
SOUND SPACE
English saxophonist central to free improvisation; co-founder of Incus Records.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
ORGANIZATION
American audio processor manufacturer, founded 1971, maker of the Harmonizer line.
INSTRUMENTS
Eventide HARDWARE
Eventide's digital multi-effects Harmonizer, a later stage in the H910/H949 lineage.
INSTRUMENTS
Tony Agnello, Eventide HARDWARE
Eventide's 1975 pitch-shifting processor, the first Harmonizer.
INSTRUMENTS
Eventide HARDWARE
Eventide's 1982 signal processor, the first programmable hardware effects unit.
INSTRUMENTS
Peter Kolman, Peter Kolman ORGANIZATION
Experimental Studio of Czechoslovak Radio
Electroacoustic music studio established within Czechoslovak Radio in Bratislava, 1964-65.
SOUND
ORGANIZATION
Australian instrument manufacturer, founded 1975 by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie.
INSTRUMENTS
Peter Vogel, Kim Ryrie, Fairlight INSTRUMENT
The first polyphonic digital sampling synthesizer, released 1979.
INSTRUMENTS
Werner "Zappi" Diermaier, Hans Joachim Irmler, Jean-Hervé Péron, Rudolf Sosna, Gunther Wüsthoff, Uwe Nettelbeck 1970
German krautrock group formed 1970 by producer Uwe Nettelbeck, pioneers of tape-collage studio composition.
SOUND
ORGANIZATION
Pete Namlook's prolific German ambient and electronic label, active through the 1990s and 2000s.
SOUND
Norbert Wiener CONCEPT
A system's output routed back as its own input, forming a causal loop — the organizing mechanism of self-regulation in cybernetics.
CYBERNETICS FEEDBACK
Thomas Lehn ALBUM 2000
Thomas Lehn's 2000 free-improvisation album for analog synthesizer.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
Austrian guitarist and laptop composer, a foundational Mego artist best known for 2001's Endless Summer.
SOUND
Borbetomagus, Voice Crack ALBUM 1988
1988 collaborative album by Borbetomagus and Voice Crack, released on Agaric Records.
SOUND FEEDBACK
Eddie Prévost, Organum ALBUM 1987
1987 collaborative LP pairing Eddie Prévost's percussion with Organum's drone.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Brazilian composer; founder and director of Studio PANaroma, shaped by a residency at Cologne's WDR studio.
SOUND
Hiroshi Yoshimura ALBUM 1987
Hiroshi Yoshimura's 1987 album of unhurried, environmental keyboard music.
SOUND SPACE PERCEPTION
John Cage COMPOSITION 1958
John Cage's 1958 indeterminate composition, generated from transparent overlays of points, curves, and lines.
SOUND TIME
Günter Müller ORGANIZATION
Günter Müller's Swiss label for free improvisation and electroacoustic music.
SOUND
Louis and Bebe Barron ALBUM 1976
Louis and Bebe Barron's 1956 score for Forbidden Planet, the first entirely electronic film soundtrack, first issued commercially in 1976.
SOUND FEEDBACK
Iannis Xenakis BOOK 1971
Xenakis on stochastic, set-theoretic, and computational approaches to composition.
NUMBER FORM COMPUTATION SOUND
Jon Hassell, Brian Eno ALBUM 1980
Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics
Jon Hassell and Brian Eno's 1980 album founding Fourth World music, fusing processed trumpet with electronics and non-Western rhythm.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Chilean biologist and philosopher; co-originator, with Humberto Maturana, of the concept of autopoiesis.
CYBERNETICS PERCEPTION FEEDBACK
French composer of acousmatic music and originator of the acousmonium.
SOUND SPACE
American composer and pianist, co-founder of Musica Elettronica Viva and member of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.
SOUND FEEDBACK
CONCEPT
Improvised music committed to non-idiomatic playing, without preset harmony, tonality, or stylistic vocabulary.
SOUND TIME
John Chowning CONCEPT
Frequency modulation (synthesis)
Generating complex timbres by using one oscillator's output to modulate another's frequency at audio rate.
COMPUTATION SOUND
ORGANIZATION
Composers' collective and publisher of experimental scores, software, and writings.
SOUND
Akifumi Nakajima ORGANIZATION
Akifumi Nakajima's (Aube) own label, releasing his work and others' in partnership with distributors across Asia, North America, and Europe.
SOUND
Jean-Claude Eloy ALBUM 1978
Jean-Claude Eloy's long-form electroacoustic film-without-images, made at NHK's Tokyo studio over 1,200 hours across 1977-78.
SOUND TIME
David Grubbs, Jim O'Rourke
Chicago experimental duo of David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke, active 1993–1998.
SOUND
PROTOCOL
A control signal marking the duration a note or event is held, on for its length and off otherwise.
INSTRUMENTS TIME
British musician and performance artist (b. Neil Andrew Megson), founder of COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV.
SOUND PERCEPTION
German mathematician who founded set theory and the study of transfinite numbers and the infinite.
NUMBER FORM
English writer; Nineteen Eighty-Four's Newspeak made language control and the rewriting of memory a working political mechanism.
LANGUAGE MEMORY
French philosopher and librarian; general economy, excess, and expenditure as the necessary discharge of a system's surplus.
DYNAMICS
French ethnomusicologist; longtime head of the Musée de l'Homme's ethnomusicology department and author of Music and Trance.
SOUND PERCEPTION
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
Ron Kuivila, Nicolas Collins ALBUM 1982
Split album between Ron Kuivila and Nicolas Collins, released 1982 on Lovely Music.
SOUND FEEDBACK COMPUTATION
British cybernetician known for conversation theory and adaptive, interactive machines.
CYBERNETICS FEEDBACK
Yasutoshi Yoshida
Yasutoshi Yoshida's Tokyo noise project, active since 1992, released chiefly through his own Xerxes label.
SOUND
CONCEPT
A device that automatically regulates a machine's speed by feeding its output back as a correction to its input — the historical root of the word cybernetics.
FEEDBACK CYBERNETICS
Curtis Roads CONCEPT
Building sound from many brief grains of audio, reassembled with independent control over density, pitch, and position.
COMPUTATION SOUND TIME
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
Hiroshi Yoshimura ALBUM 1986
Hiroshi Yoshimura's 1986 album, recorded at his home studio over the winter of 1985-86.
SOUND SPACE PERCEPTION
PLACE
The Groupe de Recherches Musicales' production facilities in Paris, including Studio 54.
SOUND
Max Mathews SOFTWARE
Max Mathews's 1970 system for real-time computer control of analog synthesizers.
COMPUTATION SOUND
Françoise Barrière, Christian Clozier ORGANIZATION
Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Bourges (GMEB)
French electroacoustic institution founded 1970 by Françoise Barrière and Christian Clozier.
SOUND
Pierre Schaeffer ORGANIZATION
Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC)
Pierre Schaeffer's 1951 research group at the Club d'Essai, the direct predecessor of the GRM.
SOUND
Pierre Schaeffer ORGANIZATION
Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM)
French institution for musique concrète and electroacoustic research.
SOUND
Franco Evangelisti, Ennio Morricone, Frederic Rzewski, Roland Kayn
Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza
Rome free-improvisation collective founded 1964 by Franco Evangelisti, among the first experimental-composer collectives.
SOUND FEEDBACK
Swiss percussionist and electronic musician, founder of the For4Ears label.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
1959
American noise and destruction-art figure; leads The Haters, treats entropy and decay as compositional material.
SOUND FEEDBACK
Dutch percussionist; co-founder of the Instant Composers Pool, central to both Dutch and British free improvisation.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Nicolas Collins BOOK 2006
Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking
Nicolas Collins's practical guide to circuit bending, hacking, and building electronic instruments.
INSTRUMENTS SOUND
Swiss physician and researcher who coined cymatics, the study of visible sound and vibration.
SOUND FORM MORPHOGENESIS
German electronic musician, co-founder of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab, Kluster, Cluster, and Harmonia.
SOUND
Aaron Dilloway ORGANIZATION
Aaron Dilloway's noise/no-wave label, founded 1994, later also a distributor and Oberlin, Ohio record shop.
SOUND
Ornette Coleman CONCEPT
Ornette Coleman's theory of harmony, melody, and rhythm holding equal, simultaneous position, developed through the 1970s-80s.
SOUND FORM
Michael Rother, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius
German electronic trio of Michael Rother, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Dieter Moebius, formed 1973 in Forst.
SOUND
American composer and instrument builder; the central figure in the 20th-century revival of just intonation.
TUNING NUMBER INSTRUMENTS
Throbbing Gristle ALBUM 1980
Throbbing Gristle's 1980 album, recorded live in the studio before an invited audience.
SOUND
Austrian-American physicist and cybernetician; founder of second-order cybernetics and the Biological Computer Laboratory.
CYBERNETICS FEEDBACK PERCEPTION
American jazz musician who brought Moog modular synthesis into jazz with his Mwandishi sextet, and later fused electronic production with hip-hop on Future Shock.
SOUND COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
German physicist and physician; founder of modern acoustics and the physiological study of tone perception.
SOUND PERCEPTION TUNING
German-Canadian composer, World Soundscape Project member, and co-founder of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.
SOUND PERCEPTION SPACE
Japanese composer central to kankyo ongaku (environmental music), pairing sound with everyday space and pace.
SOUND SPACE PERCEPTION
British experimental musician and instrument builder, Stockhausen's personal assistant in Cologne before founding Goldsmiths' Electronic Music Studios.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Jon Appleton, Don Cherry ALBUM 1970
Jon Appleton and Don Cherry's 1970 electronic-jazz collaboration, recorded at Dartmouth's Bregman studio.
SOUND
Chilean biologist; co-originator, with Francisco Varela, of the concept of autopoiesis.
CYBERNETICS PERCEPTION FEEDBACK
Alvin Lucier COMPOSITION 1969
Alvin Lucier's 1969 piece for voice and tape, recording and re-recording spoken text until only the room's own resonant frequencies remain.
SOUND SPACE FEEDBACK
Pauline Oliveros COMPOSITION 1966
Pauline Oliveros's 1966 real-time tape piece, made at the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio.
SOUND FEEDBACK
Composer and architect utilizing game theory, stochastic processes, set theory
NUMBER FORM SOUND
Richard Pinhas ALBUM 1979
Richard Pinhas' 1979 solo debut following his split from Heldon.
SOUND CYBERNETICS
Japanese engineer, founder of Roland Corporation, co-developer of the MIDI specification.
INSTRUMENTS
Daniel Burke, Jim O'Rourke 1983
Daniel Burke's long-running Chicago post-industrial project, formed 1983.
SOUND
Derek Bailey BOOK 1980
Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music
Derek Bailey's 1980 book, the first to treat improvisation across every musical tradition as a unified subject.
SOUND TIME
Robert Ashley, Paul DeMarinis ALBUM 1974
In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women
Robert Ashley's 1974 setting of John Barton Wolgamot's poem for voice and modular synthesizer.
SOUND LANGUAGE
Toshiji Mikawa, Fumio Kosakai
Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai's Japanese noise duo, active since 1981, pursuing 'pure' noise built from feedback and vocals.
SOUND FEEDBACK
Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley, Evan Parker, Michael Walters ORGANIZATION
The first musician-owned independent record label in England, founded 1970 by Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley, and Evan Parker.
SOUND
Roland Kayn ALBUM
Roland Kayn's cybernetic music of autonomously evolving electronic processes.
CYBERNETICS SOUND FEEDBACK
ORGANIZATION
Institut International de Musique Électroacoustique de Bourges (IMEB)
Successor institution to the GMEB, recognized as a National Center for Musical Creation in 1997.
SOUND
ORGANIZATION
Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA)
French national audiovisual archive institute; administrative home of the GRM since 1975.
SOUND
ORGANIZATION
Dutch electronic and computer music institute, renamed from STEM in 1967, now at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.
SOUND COMPUTATION
ORGANIZATION
Buenos Aires cultural institute founded 1958, host to CLAEM and the most significant Argentine arts institution of the 1960s.
SOUND
Louis De Meester, Hubert Vuylsteke ORGANIZATION
Ghent Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music, founded 1963.
SOUND PERCEPTION
ORGANIZATION
Paris institute for music and acoustic research, founded by Pierre Boulez in 1977.
COMPUTATION SOUND
PLACE
IRCAM's production and research studios beneath the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
SOUND COMPUTATION
Russian-American philosopher; phenomenology, the history of mathematics, and the concept-formation behind Greek and modern algebra.
NUMBER FORM
American programmer, creator of the SuperCollider audio synthesis language.
COMPUTATION SOUND
American composer and theorist; work on Gestalt perception of musical form, just intonation, and computer music.
PERCEPTION FORM SOUND TUNING
American composer, guitarist, and producer whose work threads through free improvisation, noise, indie rock, and the restoration of Roland Kayn's cybernetic music.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
American composer, discoverer of FM synthesis, co-founder of CCRMA.
COMPUTATION SOUND TUNING
American noise and performance artist, closely associated with LAFMS since the late 1970s.
SOUND PERCEPTION
American fingerstyle guitarist, founder of 'American Primitive' guitar and co-founder of Revenant Records.
SOUND
British mathematician; inventor of the Game of Life and the surreal numbers.
COMPUTATION NUMBER FORM
Canadian composer who coined 'plunderphonics' in 1985, building compositions entirely from recognizable fragments of other people's recordings.
SOUND
Mathematician; foundational to computing, game theory, and self-reproducing automata.
COMPUTATION NUMBER CYBERNETICS
American composer whose need for a better instrument at Dartmouth instigated the development of the Synclavier.
SOUND
American trumpeter and composer who developed Fourth World music, fusing electronics with non-Western vocal and instrumental technique.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Argentine writer of labyrinthine short fictions on infinity, time, memory, and language.
LANGUAGE TIME MEMORY
Polish musicologist; founder and long-serving director of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio.
SOUND
American psychologist; argued consciousness is a recent, language-built construction, not an ancient human universal.
LANGUAGE PERCEPTION MEMORY
Kimihide Kusafuka
Kimihide Kusafuka's Japanese noise project, active since the early 1980s, built from metal and machinery.
SOUND
Belgian composer, a founder of total serialism who later joined IPEM in Ghent.
SOUND NUMBER
American botanist at Cornell; plant biomechanics, allometry, and the evolution of morphology.
MORPHOGENESIS FORM
German composer, director of the WDR electronic music studio from 1963, a central figure of postwar serialism and electronic music.
SOUND TIME FORM
Richard Pinhas, Merzbow ALBUM 2008
2008 live duo recording between Richard Pinhas and Merzbow, made in Tokyo in 2007.
SOUND FEEDBACK
American composer; taught at Illinois, UCSD, and Iowa, director of the University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios.
SOUND LANGUAGE
American ambient musician and engineer who began prototyping Serge circuits in the mid-1970s and later became chief engineer at Sound Transform Systems.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Peter Liechti FILM 1989
Peter Liechti's 1989 film portrait of eastern Switzerland built around Voice Crack's junk-electronics music.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
Herbert Brün COMPOSITION 1962
Klänge Unterwegs (Wayfaring Sounds)
Herbert Brün's 1961–62 electronic composition, made at the Siemens-Studio für elektronische Musik.
SOUND COMPUTATION CYBERNETICS
ORGANIZATION
German professional audio manufacturer, founded shortly after WWII, later absorbed into Sennheiser/Neumann.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Klein + Hummel MANUAL
Klein + Hummel UE-100 — Manual
Manual for the Klein + Hummel UE-100 graphic equalizer — a 10-page scanned manual.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Norwegian-Swedish composer; director of Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm and creator of the MusicBox composition software.
COMPUTATION SOUND
ORGANIZATION
Japanese synthesizer manufacturer, founded in Tokyo in 1962, from the MS-20 and Polysix to the Wavestation.
INSTRUMENTS
Korg INSTRUMENT
Korg's 1981 four-oscillator analog synth, switchable between four-note polyphony and massed-unison mono leads.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Korg INSTRUMENT
Korg's 1978 patchable monophonic analog synth, known for its aggressive, near-self-oscillating dual filters.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Korg INSTRUMENT
Korg's 1981 six-voice analog polysynth with built-in chorus and onboard patch memory, priced at a fraction of its rivals.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Korg INSTRUMENT
Korg PS-3100 / PS-3200 / PS-3300
Korg's late-1970s PS series — among the first fully polyphonic analog synthesizers, with independent filter, envelope, and amplifier circuits per key.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Korg, Dave Smith INSTRUMENT
Korg's 1990 digital synth built around Wave Sequencing — stepping and crossfading through a sequence of waveforms to create continuously evolving timbres.
COMPUTATION SOUND INSTRUMENTS
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.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
ORGANIZATION
American manufacturer of test and measurement instruments, including precision filters, amplifiers, and distortion analyzers.
INSTRUMENTS
Krohn-Hite MANUAL
Krohn-Hite DCA-10 — Service Manual
Service documentation for the Krohn-Hite DCA-10 amplifier — a 64-page scanned manual.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Ray Kurzweil, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Cichowlas ORGANIZATION
Synthesizer manufacturer founded by Ray Kurzweil and Stevie Wonder in 1982, whose K250 was the first instrument to convincingly sample acoustic piano.
COMPUTATION SOUND
Carla Scaletti, Symbolic Sound SOFTWARE
Sound design language treating every level of a composition, from single timbre to whole piece, as a composable object.
COMPUTATION SOUND
Richard Pinhas, Gilles Deleuze ALBUM 1982
Richard Pinhas' 1982 album featuring Gilles Deleuze's spoken voice, reissued by Bureau B in 2019.
SOUND CYBERNETICS
François Bayle ALBUM 1972
François Bayle's large-scale cycle of acousmatic works composed between 1969 and 1972.
SOUND SPACE
Thorkell Sigurbjörnsson ALBUM 1975
Thorkell Sigurbjörnsson's electronic work made at UC San Diego's Center for Music Experiment, released on vinyl in 1981.
SOUND TUNING
American composer, pioneer of minimalism, sustained drone, and just intonation.
SOUND TIME TUNING
Chip Chapman, Joe Potts, Rick Potts, Tom Recchion ORGANIZATION
Los Angeles Free Music Society, a collective of noise and free-improvisation acts founded in 1973.
SOUND
Sonny Sharrock, Peter Brötzmann, Bill Laswell, Ronald Shannon Jackson ALBUM 1986
The self-titled 1986 debut of the free-jazz/noise group Last Exit.
SOUND TIME
American composer and pioneer of computer music and algorithmic composition.
SOUND TIME INSTRUMENTS
Pierre Schaeffer ALBUM 1975
Pierre Schaeffer's final work, composed entirely from synthetic sounds — his only purely electronic piece.
SOUND
League of Automatic Music Composers
Pioneering late-1970s Bay Area ensemble performing live music with a network of microcomputers.
COMPUTATION SOUND FEEDBACK INSTRUMENTS
David Behrman ALBUM 1987
David Behrman's 1987 album with Rhys Chatham, Ben Neill, and Takehisa Kosugi.
SOUND COMPUTATION FEEDBACK INSTRUMENTS
American composer and chemist; pioneer of computer-composed music, founder of the University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios.
COMPUTATION SOUND
ORGANIZATION
CEMAMu's successor name, running production and training on the UPIC system through the 1980s.
SOUND COMPUTATION
David Griesinger, Lexicon HARDWARE
Lexicon's 1978 digital reverberator, among the first commercially viable digital reverbs.
INSTRUMENTS
David Griesinger, Lexicon HARDWARE
Lexicon's 1986 reverb processor, an industry standard for studio reverb.
INSTRUMENTS
Lexicon HARDWARE
Lexicon's early digital delay unit, designed explicitly for musical effects.
INSTRUMENTS
Henri Poincaré CONCEPT
An isolated closed trajectory in a dynamical system's phase space that nearby states spiral toward, or away from — the mathematical signature of a stable, self-sustaining oscillation.
DYNAMICS
Richard Chartier ORGANIZATION
American label founded by Richard Chartier, documenting minimalist sound art and composition.
SOUND PERCEPTION
LANGUAGE
Family of programming languages built around symbolic expressions, dating to 1958.
COMPUTATION
Musica Elettronica Viva, AMM ALBUM 1970
Live Electronic Music Improvised
1970 split LP pairing live improvisations by Musica Elettronica Viva and AMM.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
American pioneers of electronic music who built circuits as living, dying sound.
SOUND FEEDBACK
French composer, co-founder of the GRM, pioneer of anecdotal music and unedited field recording.
SOUND TIME PERCEPTION
Kevin Braheny ALBUM 1980
Lullaby for the Hearts of Space
Kevin Braheny's 1980 album of live improvisations on his own 'Mighty Serge' modular synthesizer.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS SPACE
Joseph Roemer, Rodger Stella
American harsh noise project founded in Pittsburgh in 1990 by Joseph Roemer and Rodger Stella.
SOUND
American composer, flutist, and sound engineer; co-director of the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music, 1992–2018.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Susumu Yokota ALBUM 1998
Susumu Yokota's 1998 debut album, originally a limited edition of 500 CDs.
SOUND PERCEPTION
PLACE
BBC studio complex in London, home to the Radiophonic Workshop from 1958.
SOUND
CONCEPT
A space that locally resembles ordinary flat (Euclidean) space, even where its overall shape is curved or otherwise complex.
FORM SPACE
British artist and musician working with algorithmic composition, rhythm, and microtonal synthesis.
SOUND COMPUTATION TUNING
German computer musician and glitch-music pioneer, recording as Oval and as half of Microstoria.
SOUND
Composer of structure-borne sound and otoacoustic-emission works; large-scale architectural and perceptual sound.
PERCEPTION SOUND SPACE
Japanese free-jazz guitarist and pioneer of noise improvisation.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Maso Yamazaki
Maso Yamazaki's Osaka noise project, known for destructive, often seconds-long live performances.
SOUND
Miller Puckette, Cycling '74 SOFTWARE
Visual programming language for music and multimedia, created by Miller Puckette at IRCAM.
COMPUTATION SOUND
American engineer at Bell Labs who wrote MUSIC, the first widely used computer program for generating sound.
SOUND COMPUTATION
Maurizio Bianchi
Maurizio Bianchi's Italian industrial/noise project, active 1979–1983 and resumed in 1998.
SOUND
Eduard Artemyev COMPOSITION 1979
Eduard Artemyev's recurring theme for Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), a slow synthesizer drone built on the ANS-derived electronic language of his Tarkovsky scores.
SOUND TIME
Ramon Bauer, Andi Pieper, Peter Meininger, Peter Rehberg ORGANIZATION
Vienna experimental electronic label, 1994-2005, foundational to glitch and digital noise.
SOUND
CONCEPT
A system's capacity to retain past states and let them shape future behavior — a basic requirement for learning, control, and computation alike.
CYBERNETICS MEMORY COMPUTATION
American composer; founded the electronic music program at the University of North Texas in 1962.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
James Tenney, Frog Peak Music 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
Irish/English composer and ecologist; treats unprocessed bioelectrical signals from plants and fungi as sound sources.
SOUND FEEDBACK
American ambient/space-music composer and film sound designer, a founding figure of the Californian space music scene.
SOUND SPACE TIME
Dutch instrument builder and performer; director of STEIM, creator of The Hands.
INSTRUMENTS
Experimental electronic duo of Markus Popp (Oval) and Jan St. Werner (Mouse on Mars), formed in Düsseldorf in 1994.
SOUND
PROTOCOL
Musical Instrument Digital Interface, the 1983 protocol for communication between electronic instruments.
INSTRUMENTS
PROTOCOL
MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE)
An extension convention over MIDI enabling independent per-note expressive control.
INSTRUMENTS
American trumpeter and bandleader; central to the development of modal jazz and jazz fusion.
SOUND TIME
Free-jazz percussionist and researcher into rhythm, the heartbeat, and the body.
SOUND PERCEPTION FEEDBACK
Achim Szepanski ORGANIZATION
German label founded 1994 by Achim Szepanski, a primary vector for philosophy-inflected glitch, microsound, and IDM.
SOUND
Pauline Oliveros, Maggi Payne ORGANIZATION
Mills Center for Contemporary Music
Successor to the San Francisco Tape Music Center, established at Mills College in 1966 under Pauline Oliveros.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Robert Moog, Moog Music INSTRUMENT
Moog Music's 1971 compact synthesizer, the archetype for the electronic keyboard.
INSTRUMENTS
Dutch pianist and composer; co-founder of the Instant Composers Pool and STEIM.
SOUND
Shohei Iwasaki
Shohei Iwasaki's Osaka noise project, active from among the earliest years of Japan's noise scene until his death in 2005.
SOUND
David Tudor ALBUM
David Tudor's previously unreleased recordings, made in India in 1969 and reworked at a New York club a decade later.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
Robert Moog, Moog Music INSTRUMENT
Robert Moog's original voltage-controlled modular system, distinct from the later compact Minimoog.
INSTRUMENTS
Roger Sutherland, Adam Bohman, Ron Briefel, Clive Hall, Fred Sansom, Michael Prime
British free-improvisation and noise group, formed in London in 1985.
SOUND FEEDBACK
American composer and Buchla synthesizer pioneer, best known for Silver Apples of the Moon.
SOUND
David Borden, Steve Drews, Linda Fisher
Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company
David Borden's early synthesizer ensemble, founded in Ithaca in 1969 with the support of Robert Moog.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell ALBUM 1969
Duo recording by Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell, recorded in Paris and released on BYG Records in 1969.
SOUND TIME
Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell ALBUM 1970
Continuation of the Cherry/Blackwell Mu sessions, recorded in Paris and released on BYG Records in 1970.
SOUND TIME
Gilbert Rouget BOOK 1985
Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations Between Music and Possession
Gilbert Rouget's cross-cultural study of how music relates to trance and possession.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Hiroshi Yoshimura ALBUM 1982
Hiroshi Yoshimura's 1982 debut album, home-recorded, that helped define kankyo ongaku (environmental music).
SOUND SPACE PERCEPTION
Alvin Lucier, Edmond Dewan COMPOSITION 1965
Alvin Lucier's 1965 piece for amplified brainwaves and percussion, the first musical work generated directly from EEG signals.
SOUND FEEDBACK PERCEPTION
Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Hugh Davies, Jamie Muir 1968
London free-improvisation quartet active 1968-1971, pairing Derek Bailey's guitar and Evan Parker's saxophone with live electronics and percussion.
SOUND FEEDBACK
Max Mathews LANGUAGE
Max Mathews's 1968 computer music language, the most widely disseminated of the MUSIC-N series.
COMPUTATION SOUND
Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum
Rome electroacoustic improvisation ensemble, founded 1966 by Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
Iannis Xenakis COMPOSITION 1978
Xenakis's 1978 work, the first piece ever composed on the UPIC system.
NUMBER SOUND
American experimental collective behind the 1991 'U2' single lawsuit and the term 'culture jamming.'
SOUND LANGUAGE
Klaus Dinger, Michael Rother 1971
Düsseldorf krautrock duo of Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, formed 1971 after both left Kraftwerk.
SOUND TIME
David Tudor COMPOSITION 1992
David Tudor's late live-electronic work built from feedback networks.
FEEDBACK INSTRUMENTS SOUND
Cameron Jones, Sydney Alonso ORGANIZATION
American digital instrument manufacturer, 1976–1993, maker of the Synclavier.
INSTRUMENTS
Toshiro Mayuzumi, Makoto Moroi ORGANIZATION
Tokyo broadcaster's electronic music studio, completed 1954, modeled on WDR's Cologne studio.
SOUND
American composer and sound artist trained by Alvin Lucier, David Behrman, and David Tudor; a pioneer of microcomputers in live performance.
SOUND COMPUTATION FEEDBACK
Milford Graves, Don Pullen ALBUM 1967
Milford Graves and Don Pullen's self-released 1967 duo recording.
SOUND TIME
Stanisław Lem STORY 1971
Lem's fictional account of 'personoids' — conscious beings created inside a computer, who reason their way to theology.
COMPUTATION LANGUAGE
ORGANIZATION
Berlin synthesizer manufacturer founded 2011 by Stephan Schmitt, founder of Native Instruments.
INSTRUMENTS
Stephan Schmitt, Nonlinear Labs INSTRUMENT
Nonlinear Labs' 61-key digital synthesizer, built around a feedback-based physical-modeling engine for expressive, automation-free playing.
INSTRUMENTS
American mathematician who founded cybernetics, the study of control and communication in animal and machine.
CYBERNETICS FEEDBACK COMPUTATION
Steve Reid, The Legendary Master Brotherhood ALBUM 1976
Steve Reid's 1976 debut LP with The Legendary Master Brotherhood, launching his Mustevic Sound label.
SOUND TIME
Portuguese musician known for Plux Quba, a singular work of miniature electronic and acoustic sound-collage.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Steven Stapleton, John Fothergill, Heman Pathak
Steven Stapleton's project, formed in London in 1978, foundational to industrial and avant-garde music.
SOUND FEEDBACK
Tom Oberheim, Dave Rossum, Oberheim Electronics INSTRUMENT
Oberheim's 1974 Synthesizer Expander Module, its first synthesizer voice.
INSTRUMENTS
Oberheim Electronics INSTRUMENT
Oberheim's extensively programmable rack-mount synthesizer, released 1984.
INSTRUMENTS
Alan Turing PAPER 1936
On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem
Turing's 1936 paper defining the Turing machine and the limits of mechanical computation.
COMPUTATION NUMBER
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson BOOK 1917
D'Arcy Thompson's classic on the mathematics and physics of biological form.
MORPHOGENESIS FORM NUMBER
David Behrman ALBUM 1978
David Behrman's 1978 debut album, a pioneering work of computer music pairing a KIM-1 microcomputer with live players.
SOUND COMPUTATION FEEDBACK
Hermann von Helmholtz BOOK 1863
On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music
Helmholtz's foundational treatise on acoustics, timbre, and the perception of tone.
SOUND PERCEPTION TUNING
CNMAT PROTOCOL
A network-based protocol for communication between sound and media applications, developed at CNMAT.
COMPUTATION SOUND
Daphne Oram ORGANIZATION
Daphne Oram's independent studio, founded 1959 after leaving the BBC, at Tower Folly in Kent.
SOUND
David Jackman's long-running project of dense, ritualistic drone built from acoustic and processed sources.
SOUND PERCEPTION
American saxophonist and composer, developer of harmolodics and a founding figure of free jazz.
SOUND FORM
Bill Laswell, Pete Namlook ALBUM 2023
Bill Laswell and Pete Namlook's 2023 album on Cold Spring.
SOUND
Tony Conrad, Faust ALBUM 1973
Tony Conrad and Faust's 1973 landmark of sustained-tone drone minimalism.
SOUND TIME TUNING
Oval ALBUM 2001
Oval's 2001 album, marking a shift from CD-skip glitch toward more constructed digital composition.
SOUND
Kohei Gomi
Kohei Gomi's long-running Japanese noise project, cited alongside Merzbow as a leading exponent of noise's dense, loop-driven "dynamic" style.
SOUND
Mika Vainio, Ilpo Väisänen
Finnish duo making minimal, physically intense electronic music from custom-built oscillators and pulse generators.
SOUND
American synthesist who brought a Moog modular into Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band and co-founded Different Fur Recording Studio.
SOUND COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
American video artist and cybernetician; a founder of the Raindance media collective and author of Cybernetics of the Sacred.
CYBERNETICS FEEDBACK PERCEPTION
Phillip B. Klingler
Phillip B. Klingler's noise/drone project, active since 1986, moving from visual art and mail art into electroacoustic composition.
SOUND
German ambient musician and founder of the FAX label, prolific across solo work and long-running collaborative series.
SOUND
British musician and designer known as 'Sleazy' — Hipgnosis album-cover artist, founding member of Throbbing Gristle, and co-founder of Coil.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Slovak composer; co-founder and artistic director of the Experimental Studio of Czechoslovak Radio.
SOUND
British-Austrian musician (as Pita) and label head, joined Mego in 1995 and founded its successor Editions Mego in 2006.
SOUND
Luc Ferrari COMPOSITION 1973
Petite Symphonie Intuitive pour un Paysage de Printemps
Luc Ferrari's 1973-74 piece treating a spring landscape's field recordings as intuitive, near-unedited symphony.
SOUND TIME PERCEPTION
Pharoah Sanders ALBUM 1976
Pharoah Sanders's 1976 album, self-released on India Navigation.
SOUND TIME
American tenor saxophonist known for overblown, multiphonic playing and spiritual jazz, closely associated with John Coltrane's late work.
SOUND TIME
CONCEPT
The position of a periodic waveform within its cycle, and the basis for describing how two periodic signals align or diverge over time.
TIME COMPUTATION
CONCEPT
Generating FM-like timbres by modulating an oscillator's phase rather than its frequency directly.
COMPUTATION SOUND
Henri de Bellescize CONCEPT
A feedback circuit that continuously adjusts an oscillator's phase and frequency to match a reference signal.
FEEDBACK
PLACE
Philips Research Laboratories Electronic Music Studio
Eindhoven facility where Varèse realized Poème électronique for the 1958 Philips Pavilion.
SOUND
CONCEPT
Simulating the physical behavior of a real instrument's vibrating and resonating parts to generate its sound.
COMPUTATION SOUND
Nicolas Minorsky CONCEPT
A control algorithm that corrects a system's error using three combined terms — proportional, integral, and derivative — the standard formal method behind most feedback control.
FEEDBACK CYBERNETICS
French composer and engineer who founded musique concrète and the GRM.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Michael Stearns ALBUM 1981
Michael Stearns' 1981 analog space-music album, made on a Serge modular synthesizer.
SOUND SPACE
Nuno Canavarro ALBUM 1988
Nuno Canavarro's 1988 album of miniature, dreamlike electronic and acoustic sound-collage.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Józef Patkowski, Józef Patkowski ORGANIZATION
Polish Radio Experimental Studio
Warsaw electronic music studio founded 1957, one of Europe's first.
SOUND
Wolfgang Palm, PPG INSTRUMENT
PPG's 1981 wavetable synthesizer, combining analog signal paths with digital oscillators.
INSTRUMENTS
PLACE
Columbia University building on 125th Street that housed the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center's studios.
SOUND
Luc Ferrari COMPOSITION 1970
Presque Rien No. 1: Le Lever du Jour au Bord de la Mer
Luc Ferrari's 1970 tape piece built from a near-unedited dawn field recording at the sea's edge.
SOUND TIME PERCEPTION
Godfrey Winham, Paul Lansky, J. K. Randall ORGANIZATION
Princeton Computer Music Center
Princeton's own computer music studio, built around Godfrey Winham and Paul Lansky's extensions to Max Mathews' MUSIC language.
SOUND COMPUTATION
Stafford Beer, Gordon Pask SYSTEM 1971
Stafford Beer's real-time cybernetic system for managing the Chilean economy, built for Salvador Allende's government, 1971–73.
CYBERNETICS COMPUTATION
Pete Namlook, Bill Laswell ALBUM
A collection of the five Psychonavigation albums by Pete Namlook and Bill Laswell, originally released 1994-2002.
SOUND
Masahiko Togashi, Masayuki Takayanagi ALBUM 1983
1983 free-improvisation duo album pairing percussionist Masahiko Togashi with guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
John McGuire COMPOSITION 1978
John McGuire's 1978-79 phase-based electronic work, realized at the West German Radio electronic music studio.
SOUND TIME NUMBER
Miller Puckette SOFTWARE
Open-source visual programming language for music, Miller Puckette's successor to Max.
COMPUTATION SOUND
Pythagoron ALBUM 1977
The sole, privately issued 1977 album from Pythagoron, sold via mail-order as sound for altering brainwave states.
SOUND PERCEPTION
CONCEPT
Two periodic signals offset by exactly a quarter cycle (90°) — the relationship behind quadrature oscillators, phase detection, and stereo/spatial encoding.
TIME COMPUTATION
Canadian composer who founded the World Soundscape Project and the field of acoustic ecology.
SOUND PERCEPTION SPACE
David Tudor COMPOSITION 1968
David Tudor's series of works in which sounds are given physical form through resonating objects.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS SPACE
Gary Mundy, Anthony di Franco, Stuart Dennison, Philip Best
UK power electronics and noise-rock group founded by Gary Mundy in 1982.
SOUND
American drummer; a progenitor of free jazz drumming, John Coltrane's late-period drummer.
SOUND TIME
Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider, Carsten Nicolai ORGANIZATION
German label formed 1999 from the merger of Rastermusic and Noton, focused on minimal, rhythmic, and experimental electronic music.
SOUND
American inventor of the first print-to-speech reading machine, who went on to found Kurzweil Music Systems with Stevie Wonder.
COMPUTATION SOUND
American composer and inventor who built early machines for automatic music composition.
SOUND
Harry F. Olson, Herbert Belar, RCA INSTRUMENT
The first programmable electronic synthesizer, installed at Columbia-Princeton in 1957-59.
SOUND NUMBER
Steve Birchall ALBUM 1973
Steve Birchall's 1973 private-press synthesizer album, recorded on a VCS-3 and 16-track tape.
SOUND
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
John Fahey, Dean Blackwood ORGANIZATION
Austin, Texas archival label co-founded by John Fahey in 1996, specializing in blues, old-time, and experimental reissues.
SOUND
One of the CalArts students who built the first Serge systems with Serge Tcherepnin, and later founder of Sound Transform Systems.
INSTRUMENTS
Steve Reid ALBUM 1976
Steve Reid's 1976 spiritual-jazz LP on his own Mustevic Sound label, pressed in an edition of 1,000.
SOUND TIME
French guitarist and electronic musician, founder of Heldon, working at the intersection of rock and cybernetic theory.
SOUND CYBERNETICS
American composer and synthesizer pioneer, co-founder of Musica Elettronica Viva.
SOUND FEEDBACK INSTRUMENTS
Mike Ratledge, Denys Irving ALBUM 1977
Mike Ratledge's 1977 synthesizer score for Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's film, released decades later from BFI archive reels.
SOUND
Barry Truax COMPOSITION 1986
Barry Truax's 1986 composition, the first electroacoustic work built from real-time granular synthesis.
SOUND COMPUTATION TIME
American composer of television operas and pioneer of speech-based electronic music.
SOUND LANGUAGE TIME
American instrument designer who built the first sample-based drum machine, the Linn LM-1, and later designed the Akai MPC60.
COMPUTATION SOUND MEMORY INSTRUMENTS
Ikutaro Kakehashi ORGANIZATION
Japanese electronic instrument manufacturer, founded 1972 by Ikutaro Kakehashi.
INSTRUMENTS
Roland Corporation INSTRUMENT
Roland's 1987 digital synthesizer, combining sampled attack transients with synthesized tones.
INSTRUMENTS
Roland Corporation INSTRUMENT
Roland's 1976 professional modular synthesizer, its most expensive instrument.
INSTRUMENTS
Musica Elettronica Viva ALBUM 1999
Musica Elettronica Viva's Spring 1968 Rome recording, issued in 1999 with phonetically spelled liner notes.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
American composer working in live electronics, a student of Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University.
SOUND FEEDBACK COMPUTATION
American drummer who passed through Albert Ayler's, Ornette Coleman's, and Cecil Taylor's bands before co-founding Last Exit.
SOUND TIME
Jean Piché COMPOSITION 1980
Jean Piché's piece for percussion and tape, the most agitated work on his 1982 album Heliograms.
SOUND TIME
Don Cherry, Jean Schwarz ALBUM 1977
Don Cherry and Jean Schwarz's 1977 duo recording, released by Transversales Disques.
SOUND TIME
Japanese artist working with sine tones, data, and mathematics as sound and image.
NUMBER SOUND PERCEPTION
LANGUAGE
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language, used at CCRMA for computer music programming including Chowning's Stria.
COMPUTATION
Susumu Yokota ALBUM 1999
Susumu Yokota's 1999 album of dense, sample-woven ambient composition.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick ORGANIZATION
San Francisco Tape Music Center
Bay Area studio and collective founded 1962 by Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick, birthplace of the Buchla modular system.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Japanese composer and co-founder of Sound Process, a key voice in kankyo ongaku (environmental music).
SOUND SPACE PERCEPTION
Dave Smith ORGANIZATION
Dave Smith's synthesizer company, founded 1974 as Sequential Circuits, maker of the Prophet-5 and driving force behind MIDI.
INSTRUMENTS
ORGANIZATION
Serge Tcherepnin's company, selling low-cost modular synthesizers designed at CalArts from 1973 until 1986.
INSTRUMENTS
Serge Tcherepnin, Serge Modular Music Systems INSTRUMENT
Serge Tcherepnin's low-cost, flexible modular synthesizer, developed at CalArts from 1972.
INSTRUMENTS
Arnold Schoenberg CONCEPT
Composing from an ordered series of pitches or other musical elements, originating with Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.
SOUND FORM NUMBER
CONCEPT
A feedback control system that continuously compares a mechanism's actual position or speed against a target and corrects the error.
FEEDBACK
Jean-Claude Eloy ALBUM 1972
Jean-Claude Eloy's expansive electroacoustic work, realized 1972-73 at the WDR studio under Stockhausen's direction.
SOUND TIME
Terry Riley ALBUM 1980
Terry Riley's 1980 album of just-intonation electric organ and tape delay, drawing on Indian classical music.
SOUND TIME TUNING
Josef Anton Riedl, Josef Anton Riedl, Siemens & Halske ORGANIZATION
Siemens-Studio für elektronische Musik
Munich electronic music studio built from Siemens' own synthesizer, active 1959-1968.
SOUND
John Cage BOOK 1961
Silence: Lectures and Writings
John Cage's foundational collection on indeterminacy, silence, and the sounds of the world.
SOUND TIME PERCEPTION
Morton Subotnick ALBUM 1967
Morton Subotnick's 1967 LP, the first electronic work commissioned by a record label, made on the Buchla 100.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Ju Suk Reet Meate, Amazon Bambi, Dennis Duck, Cheez-It-Ritz
Los Angeles Free Music Society-affiliated experimental noise and free-improvisation group active since 1973.
SOUND
Eduard Artemyev COMPOSITION 1972
Eduard Artemyev's score for Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), built from ANS-synthesizer variations on Bach's Chorale Prelude in F Minor.
SOUND TIME
Masahiko Ohno, Katsumi Sugahara
Masahiko Ohno's Osaka noise project, built around multi-necked electric guitars of his own construction.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma
Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma's live-electronics collective, active 1966-1976.
SOUND FEEDBACK
Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Jim O'Rourke
New York noise-rock group, formed 1981, whose lineup included Jim O'Rourke from 1999 to 2005.
SOUND
American guitarist who brought free jazz's harmonic freedom to the electric guitar, without recourse to distortion as a crutch.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Rex Probe, Kevin Fortune ORGANIZATION
Successor company to Serge Modular Music Systems, founded 1993 by Rex Probe under license from Serge Tcherepnin.
INSTRUMENTS
Maso Yamazaki
Masonna's analogue electronic side project, exploring cosmic, non-rhythmic synthesis apart from his noise work.
SOUND
Albert Ayler ALBUM 1965
Albert Ayler's 1965 trio album with Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray, recorded for ESP-Disk'.
SOUND PERCEPTION
British theorist who founded management cybernetics and designed Chile's Project Cybersyn.
CYBERNETICS FEEDBACK
Polish writer and philosopher of technology; science fiction as a vehicle for cybernetic and epistemological speculation.
COMPUTATION LANGUAGE
CONCEPT
An abstract model of computation consisting of a finite set of states and the rules that transition between them in response to input.
COMPUTATION
Misha Mengelberg, Louis Andriessen, Peter Schat, Dick Raaymakers, Michel Waisvisz ORGANIZATION
Amsterdam studio for electro-instrumental music, founded 1969, focused on hands-on live-electronic instrument building.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
British-American scientist known for cellular automata and a computational view of nature.
COMPUTATION DYNAMICS FORM
American soprano saxophonist who brought the instrument back into modern jazz, and a performer with Musica Elettronica Viva.
SOUND FEEDBACK
American ambient/electronic composer known for slow-evolving synthesizer drone and desert-inspired soundscapes.
TIME SOUND
American artist and musician who coined "lowercase" sound, working with quiet, found, and object-based sources.
SOUND PERCEPTION
American musician whose 'classic period' albums pioneered TONTO's layered synthesizer textures, and who later co-founded Kurzweil Music Systems.
SOUND COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Satoshi Ashikawa ALBUM 1982
Satoshi Ashikawa's 1982 environmental-music album, the second release in the Wave Notation series.
SOUND SPACE PERCEPTION
John Chowning COMPOSITION
John Chowning's 1977 tape piece, its FM synthesis and structure built entirely on the golden ratio.
SOUND COMPUTATION NUMBER TUNING
Steve Roach ALBUM 1984
Steve Roach's 1984 ambient landmark of slow-evolving synthesizer drone.
TIME SOUND
Pierre Schaeffer, Jacques Copeau ORGANIZATION
Wartime French radio studio founded 1942, ancestor of the GRM lineage.
SOUND
Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, Alfredo Lietti ORGANIZATION
Studio di Fonologia Musicale della RAI di Milano
Milan electronic music studio founded 1955 by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna.
SOUND
Herbert Eimert, Herbert Eimert, Karlheinz Stockhausen ORGANIZATION
Studio für elektronische Musik des WDR
The world's first electronic music studio, founded 1951 at West German Radio in Cologne.
SOUND
Flo Menezes ORGANIZATION
Brazilian electroacoustic music studio founded 1994 by Flo Menezes, now at São Paulo State University.
SOUND
Roelof Vermeulen, Henk Badings, Gottfried Michael Koenig ORGANIZATION
Studio voor Elektronische Muziek (STEM)
Utrecht studio founded 1960 on Philips' Eindhoven equipment, renamed Institute of Sonology in 1967.
SOUND
CONCEPT
Shaping a harmonically rich source waveform by filtering out frequencies, rather than building a tone up from nothing.
COMPUTATION SOUND
James McCartney SOFTWARE
Audio synthesis and algorithmic composition language created by James McCartney in 1996.
COMPUTATION SOUND
Hiroshi Yoshimura ALBUM 1986
Hiroshi Yoshimura's 1986 album of environmental keyboard music.
SOUND SPACE PERCEPTION
Japanese electronic musician moving fluidly between techno, ambient, and sample-based composition.
SOUND PERCEPTION
American composer and Buchla synthesist, and a pioneering sound designer for corporate and commercial media.
INSTRUMENTS SOUND
Heinrich Strobel ORGANIZATION
Freiburg studio for live electronics, founded 1971 within the Heinrich Strobel Foundation.
SOUND
ORGANIZATION
American software company founded 1989/90 by Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel, makers of Kyma.
COMPUTATION SOUND
Cameron Jones ORGANIZATION
The modern company continuing the Synclavier lineage, run by original co-creator Cameron Jones.
INSTRUMENTS
Cameron Jones, Sydney Alonso, Jon Appleton, New England Digital INSTRUMENT
New England Digital's digital synthesis and sampling system, first shipped 1978.
INSTRUMENTS
Synclavier Digital INSTRUMENT
Synclavier Digital's 2022 desktop synthesizer, an enhanced Synclavier II engine spanning additive, subtractive, FM, and sample-based synthesis.
INSTRUMENTS
ORGANIZATION
Dutch synthesizer manufacturer and distributor, founded 1973 by Felix Visser.
INSTRUMENTS
Marc Paping, Bert Vermeulen INSTRUMENT
A 1997 analog modular synthesizer, informally 'Fénix I' once its successor arrived — the first product to carry the Synton name after the company's 1989 bankruptcy.
INSTRUMENTS
Bert Vermeulen INSTRUMENT
An expanded modular synthesizer following the original Fénix, with an accompanying Fénix III sequencer, produced around 2010.
INSTRUMENTS
Felix Visser, Marc Paping, Bert Vermeulen, Synton INSTRUMENT
Synton's 1983 monophonic analog synthesizer with a touch-plate interface, produced in only 75 units.
INSTRUMENTS
Edgar Froese, Conrad Schnitzler
German electronic group founded by Edgar Froese in 1967, pioneers of sequencer-driven Berlin School electronic music.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Roland Kayn ALBUM 1985
Roland Kayn's large-scale work of self-organizing 'cybernetic music'.
CYBERNETICS SOUND FEEDBACK
American composer central to minimalism, tape delay, and just-intonation improvisation.
SOUND TIME TUNING
Terry Riley, Don Cherry ALBUM 1975
Terry Riley / Don Cherry: Live, Köln 1975
A 1975 live recording from Köln pairing Terry Riley's synthesizers with Don Cherry's trumpet, including a broadcast of Descending Moonshine Dervishes.
SOUND TIME TUNING
Japanese ambient musician known for dense, textural electronic soundscapes, including collaborations on FAX.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Shinya Tsukamoto, Chu Ishikawa FILM 1989
Shinya Tsukamoto's 1989 cyberpunk body-horror of flesh fusing violently with metal.
FORM
Georges Bataille BOOK 1949
Georges Bataille's theory of general economy — expenditure, excess, and the necessary loss of surplus energy.
DYNAMICS
Gil Mellé ALBUM 1971
The Andromeda Strain (Original Electronic Soundtrack)
Gil Mellé's 1971 score for The Andromeda Strain, the first all-synthesizer score for a feature film.
SOUND
Gordon Pask ESSAY 1969
The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics
Pask's argument for cybernetics as a theory of architecture and interaction.
CYBERNETICS
David Tudor ALBUM
The Art of David Tudor (1963-1992)
New World Records' 7-CD retrospective box set, the first comprehensive survey of Tudor's work as a composer.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
Alan Turing PAPER 1952
The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis
Turing's 1952 paper proposing reaction–diffusion systems as the origin of biological pattern.
MORPHOGENESIS FORM DYNAMICS
Jorge Luis Borges STORY 1940
A magician sets out to dream a man into being, then discovers that he too is another's dream.
FORM MEMORY
Irdial-Discs ALBUM 1997
A 1997 compilation of recorded shortwave numbers-station transmissions, released by Irdial-Discs.
SOUND TIME LANGUAGE
Delia Derbyshire, Barry Bermange COMPOSITION 1964
Delia Derbyshire's 1964 radiophonic sound collage of dream accounts, made with writer Barry Bermange.
SOUND TIME LANGUAGE
William S. Burroughs ESSAY 1970
Burroughs's pamphlet on language as a virus and tape/electronic techniques of control and resistance.
LANGUAGE SOUND
Karl J. Niklas BOOK 1997
The Evolutionary Biology of Plants
Karl Niklas on plant form, biomechanics, and the evolution of morphology.
MORPHOGENESIS FORM
Laurie Spiegel ALBUM 1980
Laurie Spiegel's landmark of algorithmic composition made on the GROOVE system at Bell Labs.
SOUND TIME
Tony Conrad FILM 1966
Tony Conrad's 1966 landmark of structural film, built entirely from alternating black and white frames.
TIME PERCEPTION FORM
GX Jupitter-Larsen's long-running noise and destruction-art project, active since the late 1970s.
SOUND
William S. Burroughs ESSAY 1966
Burroughs on tape recorders, cut-ups, and jamming the reality studio of mass media.
LANGUAGE SOUND PERCEPTION
David B. Doty BOOK 1993
David B. Doty's practical introduction to the theory and practice of just intonation.
TUNING NUMBER SOUND
League of Automatic Music Composers ALBUM 2007
The League of Automatic Music Composers 1978-1983
New World Records anthology of the League's networked-microcomputer performances.
COMPUTATION SOUND FEEDBACK INSTRUMENTS
Jorge Luis Borges STORY 1941
The universe imagined as a total library containing every possible book of a fixed length.
NUMBER LANGUAGE SPACE
Jorge Luis Borges STORY 1941
A society governed ever more totally by an infinite lottery, until chance administers every event.
NUMBER FORM
Julian Jaynes BOOK 1976
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Julian Jaynes's theory that consciousness is a learned, language-based construction of recent historical origin.
LANGUAGE PERCEPTION MEMORY
R. Murray Schafer BOOK 1994
The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World
R. Murray Schafer's foundational study of acoustic ecology and the world as composition.
SOUND PERCEPTION SPACE
Jon Appleton COMPOSITION
The Sweet Dreams of Miss Pamela Beach
Jon Appleton electronic composition from his work developing the Synclavier at Dartmouth.
SOUND
Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela BOOK 1987
The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding
Maturana and Varela on autopoiesis, cognition, and the biology of understanding.
CYBERNETICS PERCEPTION FEEDBACK
Edward Tufte BOOK 1983
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Tufte on the principled graphical display of data.
FORM NUMBER PERCEPTION
Alvin Curran ALBUM 1976
Alvin Curran's 1976 solo album, part of New World Records' Solo Works: The '70s compilation.
SOUND FEEDBACK
La Monte Young's drone ensemble, formed in New York in 1962, later known as The Dream Syndicate.
SOUND TIME TUNING
German analog synthesist known for improvised performance on the EMS Synthi A.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
Prolific Icelandic composer who studied under Lejaren Hiller and Kenneth Gaburo at the University of Illinois.
SOUND
Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter Christopherson, Chris Carter
British industrial group pioneering industrial music and culture.
SOUND
Jorge Luis Borges STORY 1940
The encyclopedia of an invented world slowly begins to overwrite reality itself.
LANGUAGE FORM MEMORY
American self-taught composer of musique concrète, working outside the institutional studios of his European peers.
SOUND
Thomas Lehn, Gerry Hemingway ALBUM 1999
1999 duo album pairing Thomas Lehn's analog synthesizer with Gerry Hemingway's drums and percussion.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS TIME
Malcolm Cecil, Robert Margouleff INSTRUMENT
TONTO (The Original New Timbral Orchestra)
A vast multitimbral analog modular synthesizer built by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, best known for shaping Stevie Wonder's classic-period albums.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
American violinist, filmmaker, and composer, a member of the Theatre of Eternal Music from 1964 to 1966.
SOUND TIME TUNING
English percussionist central to free improvisation; co-founder of Incus Records.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Han Bennink ALBUM 1970
1970 trio recording by Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, and Han Bennink — Incus Records' inaugural release and Parker's debut as a leader.
SOUND
Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Milton Babbitt CONCEPT
Extending serial ordering beyond pitch to duration, dynamics, and timbre, pioneered by Messiaen, Boulez, and Stockhausen.
SOUND FORM NUMBER
PLACE
Converted oast house in Fairseat, Kent, housing Daphne Oram's independent studio from 1959.
SOUND SPACE
Organum ALBUM 1985
1985 Organum LP of dense, ritualistic drone on L.A.Y.L.A.H. Antirecords.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Eduard Artemyev COMPOSITION 1979
Eduard Artemyev's cue for the trolley journey into the Zone in Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), blending railroad noise with synthesizer drone.
SOUND TIME SPACE
Kraftwerk ALBUM 1977
Kraftwerk's 1977 album built around the image of the European rail network.
SOUND TIME
François Bayle ALBUM 1978
François Bayle's acousmatic works from 1978 and 1979, reissued by Recollection GRM.
SOUND SPACE
PROTOCOL
A brief control pulse marking the onset of an event, without indicating its duration.
INSTRUMENTS TIME
Éliane Radigue ALBUM 1998
Éliane Radigue's three-part electronic meditation on death and passage.
SOUND TIME PERCEPTION
La Monte Young COMPOSITION 1958
La Monte Young's 1958 work of extended, sustained tones, widely cited as an origin point of musical minimalism.
SOUND TIME TUNING
CONCEPT
A finite, ordered sequence of elements — the general form behind coordinates, database records, and structured data of every kind.
NUMBER COMPUTATION
Alan Turing CONCEPT
An abstract model of computation — an infinite tape, a read/write head, and a finite table of rules — that defines what it means for a function to be computable at all.
COMPUTATION
Steven Stapleton, John Fothergill ORGANIZATION
Steven Stapleton's label, founded to release Nurse With Wound and related experimental music.
SOUND FEEDBACK
Pauline Oliveros ORGANIZATION
University of California, San Diego Electronic Music Studio
UCSD's electronic music studio, established 1967 by Pauline Oliveros, later renamed the Center for Music Experiment.
SOUND
Erkki Kurenniemi ORGANIZATION
University of Helsinki Electronic Music Studio
Finland's first electronic music studio, built by Erkki Kurenniemi from 1962.
SOUND
Lejaren Hiller ORGANIZATION
University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios
Founded 1958 by Lejaren Hiller, arguably the first electronic/computer music studio in the Western Hemisphere.
SOUND COMPUTATION NUMBER
Philip Bezanson, Robert Shallenberg, Kenneth Gaburo ORGANIZATION
University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios
Founded 1964 around the world's first real-time digital synthesizer, built by James Cessna.
SOUND COMPUTATION
ORGANIZATION
University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio
Canadian electronic music studio built around a bank of twelve keyboard-controlled oscillators.
SOUND
Patrick Saint-Jean, Iannis Xenakis INSTRUMENT
Xenakis's graphic composition system, translating tablet drawings directly into sound.
SOUND COMPUTATION FORM
Italian neuroscientist and cyberneticist; founding director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.
CYBERNETICS PERCEPTION COMPUTATION
Emerald Web ALBUM
Valley of the Birds (Remastered)
Emerald Web's synthesizer duo album, remastered.
SOUND INSTRUMENTS
Michio Teshima ORGANIZATION
Kyoto noise label run by Michio Teshima, an early hub for the Japanese noise scene's key acts, 1989–1995.
SOUND
W. Ross Ashby CONCEPT
In cybernetics, the number of distinguishable states a system can take on — and, per Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, the true measure of a regulator's power to control.
CYBERNETICS
CONCEPT
A quantity with both magnitude and direction, represented as an ordered set of components — one of the basic building blocks of geometry, physics, and computation.
NUMBER FORM
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
Organum, Eddie Prévost ALBUM 1994
1994 Organum CD on Matchless Recordings, limited to 1,500 copies.
SOUND PERCEPTION
Stafford Beer CONCEPT
Stafford Beer's model of organizational structure, mapped by analogy to the nervous system, recursively nesting five subsystems.
CYBERNETICS FEEDBACK
Masaya Nakahara
Masaya Nakahara's Tokyo noise project, active from 1988 alongside his work as a writer and, later, actor.
SOUND
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
Charles Tyler Ensemble, Steve Reid ALBUM 1975
Charles Tyler Ensemble's 1975 free-jazz album.
SOUND TIME
English psychiatrist and cyberneticist; formulated the Law of Requisite Variety.
CYBERNETICS
Waldorf Music INSTRUMENT
Waldorf's wavetable synthesizer, reviving the PPG Wave lineage with an extensive knob-per-function interface.
INSTRUMENTS
ORGANIZATION
German synthesizer manufacturer founded in 1988 by PPG's former German distributor.
INSTRUMENTS
ORGANIZATION
Satoshi Ashikawa's environmental-music imprint on his Sound Process label, home to the three-LP Wave Notation series.
SOUND SPACE PERCEPTION
CONCEPT
Reflecting a waveform back on itself once it crosses a threshold, generating additional harmonics.
COMPUTATION SOUND
CONCEPT
Storing successive single-cycle waveforms in memory and scanning between them to shape timbre.
COMPUTATION SOUND
American composer and synthesist, pioneer of the Moog synthesizer in recorded music.
SOUND TUNING
ORGANIZATION
Modular synthesizer company founded by Grant Richter in 1999, reinterpreting Buchla-derived 'West Coast' ideas in a DIY-accessible format.
INSTRUMENTS
American writer; the cut-up method, tape-recorder experiments, and language as a control system.
LANGUAGE SOUND
John Cage COMPOSITION 1952
John Cage's 1952–53 tape composition assembled from hundreds of spliced sound fragments organized by chance operations.
SOUND TIME
Nate Young, Aaron Dilloway, John Olson
Michigan noise group formed by Nate Young in 1996, later a duo with John Olson.
SOUND FEEDBACK
R. Murray Schafer ORGANIZATION 1969
R. Murray Schafer's research group at Simon Fraser University that founded acoustic ecology.
SOUND PERCEPTION SPACE
Xenharmonic community WEBSITE
A deep reference for microtonal music — tunings, temperaments, scales, notation.
NUMBER TUNING SOUND
Yasutoshi Yoshida ORGANIZATION
Yasutoshi Yoshida's own label, releasing his Government Alpha noise project since 1992.
SOUND
ORGANIZATION
Japanese musical instrument manufacturer, founded as Nippon Gakki in 1887, that brought FM synthesis to market with the DX7.
INSTRUMENTS
John Chowning, Yamaha INSTRUMENT
Yamaha's 1984 FM flagship above the DX7 — a doubled six-operator engine in a handmade rosewood cabinet with polyphonic aftertouch.
COMPUTATION SOUND INSTRUMENTS
John Chowning, Yamaha INSTRUMENT
The 1983 FM synthesizer that made digital synthesis commercially dominant and became the best-selling synthesizer of all time.
COMPUTATION SOUND INSTRUMENTS
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