League of Automatic Music Composers

Formed in the San Francisco Bay Area, the League of Automatic Music Composers first performed under that name in November 1978 — a wry nod to Aaron Copland’s 1920s League of Composers — built around a core of John Bischoff, Jim Horton, Rich Gold, and Tim Perkis, later joined by Paul DeMarinis and David Behrman. Rather than a fixed instrumental lineup, the group networked home microcomputers — inexpensive machines like the KIM-1, newly available to individuals rather than institutions — so that each performer’s circuit could listen to and influence the others’ output in real time, producing collectively emergent, unrepeatable musical behavior the group described as seeking “musical artificial intelligences.” Active until 1983, it is widely credited as the first computer network band, and its practice of building custom hardware and software for live networked performance continued directly into several members’ later group, The Hub, formed in 1986.