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Microstoria, Markus Popp ALBUM 1996
Microstoria's 1996 album of understated, organic-sounding ambient electronics.
Throbbing Gristle ALBUM 1979
Throbbing Gristle's 1979 album, its cover parodying easy-listening compilations while the music undercuts the joke.
Pete Namlook, Tetsu Inoue ALBUM 1995
Self-titled 1995 ambient collaboration between Pete Namlook and Tetsu Inoue.
Pauline Oliveros COMPOSITION
Pauline Oliveros piece documenting her early electronic work at UCSD, 1967-1970.
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.
INSTRUMENTS
American noise musician, member of Wolf Eyes from 1998 to 2005, founder of Hanson Records.
P16.D4's 1989 compilation across four sections of tape composition, concrète improvisation, and a direct Merzbow collaboration.
CONCEPT
Building a complex timbre by summing simple waveforms, typically sine tones, at chosen amplitudes.
NUMBER COMPUTATION
Éliane Radigue ALBUM 1974
Éliane Radigue's slowly unfolding drone cycle (Adnos I–III).
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.
TIME COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Brian Eno, Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Conny Plank ALBUM 1978
The 1978 second collaborative album between Brian Eno and Cluster, credited to Eno Moebius Roedelius.
Roger Linn, Akai INSTRUMENT 1988
1988 integrated sampler, drum machine, and MIDI sequencer designed by Roger Linn for Akai, foundational to hip-hop production.
TIME COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS MEMORY
American saxophonist; central figure in free jazz, known for raw tone and collective improvisation.
PERCEPTION
Lejaren Hiller CONCEPT
Composing via algorithms or formal rule systems, from computer-generated scores to live coding.
COMPUTATION FORM
American composer, co-founder of Musica Elettronica Viva.
American composer exploring acoustic phenomena, resonance, and the physics of sound in space.
PERCEPTION SPACE
Brian Eno ALBUM 1978
Brian Eno's 1978 album, the record that formally defined ambient music as sound to accommodate rather than demand attention.
PERCEPTION SPACE
Brian Eno ALBUM 1982
Brian Eno's 1982 album of remembered and imagined landscapes, the fourth in his Ambient series.
SPACE MEMORY
John Olson ORGANIZATION
John Olson's Detroit noise/drone cassette label, founded 1991, known for elaborate handmade packaging.
American free-jazz drummer known for his work with Cecil Taylor and his own long solo and duo practice.
TIME
Yevgeny Murzin INSTRUMENT
A Soviet photoelectronic instrument that generates sound by scratching microtonal tracks directly onto rotating glass discs, read optically.
TUNING INSTRUMENTS
1945
American composer and multi-instrumentalist, an original member of the AACM and one of the most prolific figures in creative music.
FORM
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.
INSTRUMENTS
German electronic music pioneer, active in Hamburg since the mid-1960s, pursuing rigorous 'absolute music' through musique concrète and synthesis.
FORM
Akifumi Nakajima
Akifumi Nakajima's Kyoto noise project, each record built by processing a single manipulated sound source.
ORGANIZATION
British embedded audio platform maker, founded 2016 from Queen Mary University of London research.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Kraftwerk, Conny Plank ALBUM 1974
Kraftwerk's 1974 breakthrough album, its title track a US Top 5 hit that established the group's electronic concept-album approach.
TIME
Robert Ashley ALBUM 1979
Robert Ashley's 1979 album exploring involuntary speech and Tourette's syndrome through electronics.
PERCEPTION LANGUAGE
Takashi Sekiguchi ALBUM
Takashi Sekiguchi's album exploring bamboo and Asian wind instruments.
INSTRUMENTS
Canadian composer, World Soundscape Project member, and pioneer of real-time granular synthesis.
COMPUTATION PERCEPTION SPACE
New Zealand-born composer and computer scientist, creator of Csound.
COMPUTATION LANGUAGE
Thomas Lehn, Marcus Schmickler ALBUM 2000
Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler's 2000 duo album, released on Erstwhile Records.
FEEDBACK
Desmond Briscoe, Daphne Oram, Desmond Briscoe ORGANIZATION
BBC department for electronic sound and music, founded 1958 at Maida Vale Studios.
Wendy Carlos ALBUM 1986
Wendy Carlos's 1986 album exploring alternative tunings and scales built from scratch.
TUNING
Brian Eno ALBUM 1977
Brian Eno's 1977 album, his last vocal record before turning fully to the ambient series, closing with 'Julie with...'.
Augmented Instruments HARDWARE
Ultra-low-latency embedded audio and sensor platform, built on the BeagleBone Black.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Augmented Instruments HARDWARE
2025 stereo audio/sensor add-on board for the PocketBeagle 2, successor to the original Bela.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Augmented Instruments HARDWARE
10-in/10-out variant of Bela Gem, for more complex multichannel audio projects.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
ORGANIZATION
American research laboratory where Max Mathews developed the first computer music software.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
French composer of musique concrète and acousmatic sound.
PERCEPTION
American bassist, producer, and prolific collaborator across free jazz, dub, ambient, and experimental studio production.
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
Miles Davis ALBUM 1970
Miles Davis's 1970 double album, a foundational fusion of jazz improvisation with electric instruments and studio editing.
INSTRUMENTS
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.
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.
David Rosenboom ALBUM 1975
David Rosenboom's 1975 biofeedback-driven electronic music, expanded and reissued by Black Truffle in 2019.
FEEDBACK PERCEPTION
PLACE
Bregman Electronic Music Studio
Dartmouth College's electronic music studio, directed by Jon Appleton, where the Synclavier was later developed.
British musician and originator of ambient and generative music.
TIME FORM COMPUTATION
Gary Mundy ORGANIZATION
UK power electronics label founded by Gary Mundy of Ramleh in the mid-1980s.
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
Barry Truax ORGANIZATION
Barry Truax's own label, founded 1985 to release computer and electroacoustic music outside commercial distribution.
COMPUTATION
American engineer, co-creator of the Synclavier at Dartmouth College.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
German artist and musician, recording as Alva Noto; founder of Noton and co-founder of Raster-Noton.
ORGANIZATION
Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, founded 1974.
COMPUTATION
American pianist and poet, a founding figure of free jazz's percussive, dense keyboard language.
INSTRUMENTS
Iannis Xenakis ORGANIZATION
Iannis Xenakis's Paris research center for music and mathematics, formalized 1972, birthplace of the UPIC system.
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.
The New Blockaders ALBUM 1982
The New Blockaders' 1982 debut, widely cited as the first true noise record of the modern era.
George Lewis, Douglas Ewart, J.D. Parran, Richard Teitelbaum ALBUM 1981
George Lewis's 1981 album combining trombone and live electronics with Richard Teitelbaum's Moog modular.
INSTRUMENTS
British musician and electronics designer, founding member of Throbbing Gristle and inventor of the Gristleizer.
INSTRUMENTS
Japanese composer and industrial musician; longtime film composer for Shinya Tsukamoto.
Bill Laswell, Coil, Tetsu Inoue ALBUM 1997
Bill Laswell's 1997 album, featuring a 13-minute Coil composition among its collaborators.
Alberto Ginastera, Alberto Ginastera ORGANIZATION
Latin American composition institute at Buenos Aires's Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, founded 1962 by Alberto Ginastera.
Pierre Schaeffer ORGANIZATION
Paris radio research club, renamed from the Studio d'Essai in 1946, where Pierre Schaeffer began musique concrète.
Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius
German electronic duo central to krautrock and ambient electronics.
Cluster, Conny Plank ALBUM 1971
The 1971 debut album of Cluster (Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius), informally known as Cluster '71.
Cluster, Brian Eno, Conny Plank ALBUM 1977
The 1977 collaborative album between Cluster and Brian Eno, the first of two the pairing recorded together.
Cluster, Conny Plank ALBUM 1972
Cluster's 1972 second album, extending the electronic drone of their debut with tape manipulation and rhythm.
F. Richard Moore LANGUAGE
A MUSIC-N-descended computer music language written in C by F. Richard Moore at UCSD.
COMPUTATION LANGUAGE
Richard Felciano, David Wessel ORGANIZATION
UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, founded 1989, co-developer of Open Sound Control.
COMPUTATION PERCEPTION
John Balance, Peter Christopherson
British experimental group formed by John Balance and Peter Christopherson in 1984, exploring the occult and dark ambient.
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.
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.
INSTRUMENTS
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.
INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
CONCEPT
Music composed or generated with the aid of computation, from the earliest MUSIC-N software onward.
COMPUTATION
Conrad Schnitzler ALBUM 1978
Conrad Schnitzler's electronic work of restless synthetic textures.
INSTRUMENTS
Iannis Xenakis COMPOSITION 1958
Electroacoustic music composed by Iannis Xenakis for the Philips Pavilion he designed for Expo 58.
FORM SPACE
1940
German record producer and sound engineer, the unifying studio hand behind much of krautrock.
Prolific German electronic musician and Kluster co-founder.
INSTRUMENTS
British musician and artist (b. Christine Newby), founding member of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle.
C.C.C.C. ALBUM 1992
Cosmic Coincidence Control Center
C.C.C.C.'s 1992 debut album, formed from electronic noise, tonality, and metal percussion.
Space Machine ALBUM 2001
Cosmos From Diode Ladder Filter
Maso Yamazaki's 2001 all-analog cosmic-electronic album under the Space Machine name.
INSTRUMENTS
Gianni Sassi, Sergio Albergoni, Tony Tasinato, Franco Mamone ORGANIZATION
Milan avant-garde label (1972-1980) whose Nova Musicha series brought John Cage and Fluxus-adjacent composers to Italian audiences alongside prog and punk.
Barry Vercoe SOFTWARE
Barry Vercoe's 1985 sound synthesis programming language, descended from the MUSIC-N lineage.
COMPUTATION LANGUAGE
American composer and researcher who first programmed Xenakis's theory of granular synthesis, later formalizing it in Microsound.
COMPUTATION TIME
Klaus Schulze ALBUM 1973
Klaus Schulze's 1973 second album, adding the EMS VCS3 synthesizer to the approach of Irrlicht.
INSTRUMENTS
ORGANIZATION
American software company, founded 1997 by David Zicarelli to continue commercial development of Max.
COMPUTATION
Else Marie Pade ORGANIZATION
Danish Radio Electronic Music Studio
Informal studio Else Marie Pade organized at Danmarks Radio in the late 1950s.
Derek Bailey, Jamie Muir ALBUM 1981
1981 duo album by Derek Bailey and Jamie Muir, recorded at Crane Grove, London.
American engineer, founder of E-mu Systems and pioneer of sampling instrument design.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
American engineer, founder of Sequential, designer of the Prophet-5, and driving force behind the MIDI specification.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS LANGUAGE
American composer, co-founder of the Sonic Arts Union, and Columbia Records producer of the 'Music of Our Time' series.
COMPUTATION
American composer, founder of Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company, one of the first ensembles to perform live on synthesizers.
INSTRUMENTS
American composer and bioacoustician working at the intersection of music, language, and environment.
CYBERNETICS PERCEPTION LANGUAGE
American composer and pioneer of biofeedback and brainwave music, longtime Dean of Music at CalArts.
FEEDBACK PERCEPTION
Pianist turned live-electronics pioneer; Rainforest and feedback instruments.
INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
Bernard Parmegiani ALBUM 1975
Bernard Parmegiani's 1975 cycle of twelve electroacoustic studies on the nature of sound.
PERCEPTION
Incapacitants ALBUM 1999
Incapacitants' 1999 album, five tracks of feedback and electronic manipulation.
FEEDBACK
British composer and BBC Radiophonic Workshop pioneer of musique concrète and electronic sound.
TIME
Virgin Islands-born drummer whose loose, melodic pulse shaped early free jazz.
INSTRUMENTS TIME
1946
New Zealand-born composer of acousmatic music, who coined the analytical concept of spectromorphology.
TIME FORM PERCEPTION
Michael Hoenig ALBUM 1978
Departure From the Northern Wasteland
Michael Hoenig's 1978 solo debut, a Berlin School album built from sequenced analog synthesizer patterns.
TIME
English guitarist central to free improvisation and non-idiomatic playing.
INSTRUMENTS
Terry Riley ALBUM 1982
Descending Moonshine Dervishes
Terry Riley's 1982 album of just-intonation electric organ improvisation.
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.
SPACE
Mark Mothersbaugh, Bob Mothersbaugh, Gerald Casale, Bob Casale, Alan Myers 1973
American new wave group from Akron, Ohio, formed 1973, known for its satirical de-evolution concept and Brian Eno-produced debut.
Kraftwerk ALBUM 1978
Kraftwerk's 1978 album on the figure of the human as machine.
Swiss-born German electronic musician, co-founder of Kluster, Cluster, and Harmonia.
CONCEPT
Recording and digitally storing a sound for playback, pitch-shifting, and manipulation.
COMPUTATION 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.
INSTRUMENTS
American pianist and organist central to free jazz, known for percussive clusters and rolling-forearm technique.
TIME
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.
Dave Rossum, E-mu Systems INSTRUMENT
E-mu Systems' 1984 sampling keyboard.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS MEMORY
Dave Rossum ORGANIZATION
American sampling instrument manufacturer founded by Dave Rossum.
INSTRUMENTS
Masayuki Takayanagi, Kenji Mori, Nobuyoshi Ino, Hiroshi Yamazaki ALBUM 1975
Masayuki Takayanagi's 1975 album, pairing the pieces Gradually Projection and Mass Projection.
American jazz drummer known for his work with Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, bringing New Orleans rhythm into free jazz.
TIME
British percussionist, co-founder of AMM, and founder of Matchless Recordings.
PERCEPTION
Russian electronic and film composer, best known for scoring Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, The Mirror, and Stalker.
TIME
Tod Dockstader ALBUM 1961
Tod Dockstader's self-produced 1961 debut, built after-hours at a New York radio station without institutional support.
Sonic Arts Union ALBUM 1972
Sonic Arts Union's 1972 album, one live-electronics piece from each of its four members.
INSTRUMENTS
Edgar Froese, Klaus Schulze, Conrad Schnitzler ALBUM 1970
Tangerine Dream's 1970 debut LP, the only album to feature Edgar Froese, Klaus Schulze, and Conrad Schnitzler together.
INSTRUMENTS
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.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
French composer of slowly evolving electronic and acoustic drone music.
TIME PERCEPTION
PLACE
Peter Zinovieff's home studio in Putney, London, founded 1965, running the MUSYS computer music system.
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.
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.
TIME COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Ensoniq INSTRUMENT
Ensoniq's 1984 sampling keyboard, priced an order of magnitude below the Fairlight and Emulator, that made digital sampling affordable.
COMPUTATION MEMORY INSTRUMENTS
Jean Schwarz ALBUM 1972
Jean Schwarz's electroacoustic pieces Erda (1972) and Suite N (1982), reissued together by Recollection GRM.
Finnish inventor and composer; built the University of Helsinki's electronic music studio and the DIMI series of instruments.
CYBERNETICS COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
François Bayle COMPOSITION 1980
François Bayle's cyclical 1980 acousmatic composition, tracing an arc from urban tumult toward expansive soundscape.
TIME SPACE
Jon Abbey ORGANIZATION 1999
Jersey City label founded 1999 by Jon Abbey, documenting electroacoustic improvisation almost exclusively through duo and trio recordings.
English saxophonist central to free improvisation; co-founder of Incus Records.
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.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Tony Agnello, Eventide HARDWARE
Eventide's 1975 pitch-shifting processor, the first Harmonizer.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Eventide HARDWARE
Eventide's 1982 signal processor, the first programmable hardware effects unit.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS SPACE
Peter Kolman, Peter Kolman ORGANIZATION
Experimental Studio of Czechoslovak Radio
Electroacoustic music studio established within Czechoslovak Radio in Bratislava, 1964-65.
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.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS MEMORY
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.
ORGANIZATION
Pete Namlook's prolific German ambient and electronic label, active through the 1990s and 2000s.
Incapacitants ALBUM 1991
Incapacitants' 1991 album, three tracks combining junk metal, modular synthesis, and improvisation.
FEEDBACK
Thomas Lehn ALBUM 2000
Thomas Lehn's 2000 free-improvisation album for analog synthesizer.
INSTRUMENTS
Sachiko M, Günter Müller, Otomo Yoshihide ALBUM 1999
1999 trio album by Sachiko M, Günter Müller, and Otomo Yoshihide, recorded at GOK Sound, Tokyo.
Tangerine Dream ALBUM 1984
Firestarter (Music From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Tangerine Dream's 1984 electronic score for the film adaptation of Stephen King's Firestarter.
Borbetomagus, Voice Crack ALBUM 1988
1988 collaborative album by Borbetomagus and Voice Crack, released on Agaric Records.
INSTRUMENTS
Eddie Prévost, Organum ALBUM 1987
1987 collaborative LP pairing Eddie Prévost's percussion with Organum's drone.
Brazilian composer; founder and director of Studio PANaroma, shaped by a residency at Cologne's WDR studio.
Hiroshi Yoshimura ALBUM 1987
Hiroshi Yoshimura's 1987 album of unhurried, environmental keyboard music.
SPACE PERCEPTION
John Cage COMPOSITION 1958
John Cage's 1958 indeterminate composition, generated from transparent overlays of points, curves, and lines.
TIME
Günter Müller ORGANIZATION
Günter Müller's Swiss label for free improvisation and electroacoustic music.
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.
INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
Iannis Xenakis BOOK 1971
Xenakis on stochastic, set-theoretic, and computational approaches to composition.
NUMBER FORM COMPUTATION
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.
French composer of acousmatic music and originator of the acousmonium.
INSTRUMENTS SPACE
American tenor saxophonist associated with free jazz.
American composer and pianist, co-founder of Musica Elettronica Viva and member of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.
CONCEPT
Improvised music committed to non-idiomatic playing, without preset harmony, tonality, or stylistic vocabulary.
TIME
John Chowning CONCEPT
Frequency modulation (synthesis)
Generating complex timbres by using one oscillator's output to modulate another's frequency at audio rate.
NUMBER COMPUTATION
ORGANIZATION
Composers' collective and publisher of experimental scores, software, and writings.
Akifumi Nakajima ORGANIZATION
Akifumi Nakajima's (Aube) own label, releasing his work and others' in partnership with distributors across Asia, North America, and Europe.
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.
TIME
David Grubbs, Jim O'Rourke
Chicago experimental duo of David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke, active 1993–1998.
British musician and performance artist (b. Neil Andrew Megson), founder of COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV.
PERCEPTION
1952
American trombonist, composer, and computer-music pioneer; AACM member and creator of the interactive improvisation software Voyager.
COMPUTATION PERCEPTION FEEDBACK
French ethnomusicologist; longtime head of the Musée de l'Homme's ethnomusicology department and author of Music and Trance.
PERCEPTION
Ron Kuivila, Nicolas Collins ALBUM 1982
Split album between Ron Kuivila and Nicolas Collins, released 1982 on Lovely Music.
INSTRUMENTS
Yasutoshi Yoshida
Yasutoshi Yoshida's Tokyo noise project, active since 1992, released chiefly through his own Xerxes label.
Curtis Roads CONCEPT
Building sound from many brief grains of audio, reassembled with independent control over density, pitch, and position.
COMPUTATION TIME
Hiroshi Yoshimura ALBUM 1986
Hiroshi Yoshimura's 1986 album, recorded at his home studio over the winter of 1985-86.
SPACE PERCEPTION
Merzbow ALBUM 1995
Merzbow's 1995 album of pure, unadulterated noise built from synthesizers and handmade instruments.
PLACE
The Groupe de Recherches Musicales' production facilities in Paris, including Studio 54.
Max Mathews SOFTWARE
Max Mathews's 1970 system for real-time computer control of analog synthesizers.
TIME COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Françoise Barrière, Christian Clozier ORGANIZATION
Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Bourges (GMEB)
French electroacoustic institution founded 1970 by Françoise Barrière and Christian Clozier.
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.
Pierre Schaeffer ORGANIZATION
Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM)
French institution for musique concrète and electroacoustic research.
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.
1959
American noise and destruction-art figure; leads The Haters, treats entropy and decay as compositional material.
NUMBER LANGUAGE
Dutch percussionist; co-founder of the Instant Composers Pool, central to both Dutch and British free improvisation.
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
Jeph Jerman 1986
Jeph Jerman's project built from found natural objects, homemade devices, and tape, active from the mid-1980s.
INSTRUMENTS
German electronic musician, co-founder of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab, Kluster, Cluster, and Harmonia.
Aaron Dilloway ORGANIZATION
Aaron Dilloway's noise/no-wave label, founded 1994, later also a distributor and Oberlin, Ohio record shop.
Ornette Coleman CONCEPT
Ornette Coleman's theory of harmony, melody, and rhythm holding equal, simultaneous position, developed through the 1970s-80s.
TIME FORM
Michael Rother, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius
German electronic trio of Michael Rother, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Dieter Moebius, formed 1973 in Forst.
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.
K2 ALBUM 1994
K2's 1994 album, junk-metal noise built as exhausting, jarring cut-up.
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.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
German physicist and physician; founder of modern acoustics and the physiological study of tone perception.
PERCEPTION TUNING
David Hilbert CONCEPT 1905
A linear operator that shifts every frequency component of a signal by 90°, used to construct the analytic signal and recover instantaneous phase, frequency, and amplitude.
NUMBER COMPUTATION
German-Canadian composer, World Soundscape Project member, and co-founder of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.
PERCEPTION SPACE
Japanese composer central to kankyo ongaku (environmental music), pairing sound with everyday space and pace.
SPACE PERCEPTION
British experimental musician and instrument builder, Stockhausen's personal assistant in Cologne before founding Goldsmiths' Electronic Music Studios.
INSTRUMENTS
Jon Appleton, Don Cherry ALBUM 1970
Jon Appleton and Don Cherry's 1970 electronic-jazz collaboration, recorded at Dartmouth's Bregman studio.
Merzbow ALBUM 1997
One of Merzbow's most accessible 1990s albums, built on EMS and Moog synthesizers, theremin, and processed voice.
INSTRUMENTS
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.
SPACE FEEDBACK
Pauline Oliveros COMPOSITION 1966
Pauline Oliveros's 1966 real-time tape piece, made at the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio.
TIME INSTRUMENTS
Composer and architect utilizing game theory, stochastic processes, set theory
NUMBER FORM COMPUTATION SPACE
Richard Pinhas ALBUM 1979
Richard Pinhas' 1979 solo debut following his split from Heldon.
Japanese engineer, founder of Roland Corporation, co-developer of the MIDI specification.
INSTRUMENTS LANGUAGE
Daniel Burke, Jim O'Rourke 1983
Daniel Burke's long-running Chicago post-industrial project, formed 1983.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Roland Kayn ALBUM
Roland Kayn's cybernetic music of autonomously evolving electronic processes.
FORM MORPHOGENESIS DYNAMICS CYBERNETICS
ORGANIZATION
Institut International de Musique Électroacoustique de Bourges (IMEB)
Successor institution to the GMEB, recognized as a National Center for Musical Creation in 1997.
ORGANIZATION
Dutch electronic and computer music institute, renamed from STEM in 1967, now at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.
COMPUTATION
Louis De Meester, Hubert Vuylsteke ORGANIZATION
Ghent Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music, founded 1963.
PERCEPTION
ORGANIZATION
Paris institute for music and acoustic research, founded by Pierre Boulez in 1977.
COMPUTATION
PLACE
IRCAM's production and research studios beneath the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
COMPUTATION
Klaus Schulze ALBUM 1972
Klaus Schulze's 1972 solo debut, built from organ and heavily filtered orchestral recordings, without synthesizers.
TIME
American programmer, creator of the SuperCollider audio synthesis language.
COMPUTATION LANGUAGE
American composer and theorist; work on Gestalt perception of musical form, just intonation, and computer music.
PERCEPTION FORM TUNING
1959
American sound artist and field recordist working with found natural objects and homemade devices, founder of Big Body Parts.
INSTRUMENTS
American composer, guitarist, and producer whose work threads through free improvisation, noise, rock, and electronic music.
INSTRUMENTS
American noise and performance artist, closely associated with LAFMS since the late 1970s.
PERCEPTION
Canadian composer who coined 'plunderphonics' in 1985, building compositions entirely from recognizable fragments of other people's recordings.
American noise musician, member of Sissy Spacek, founder of the Helicopter label.
American composer whose need for a better instrument at Dartmouth instigated the development of the Synclavier.
INSTRUMENTS
American trumpeter and composer who developed Fourth World music, fusing electronics with non-Western vocal and instrumental technique.
PERCEPTION
Polish musicologist; founder and long-serving director of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio.
Kimihide Kusafuka
Kimihide Kusafuka's Japanese noise project, active since the early 1980s, built from metal and machinery.
Belgian composer, a founder of total serialism who later joined IPEM in Ghent.
TIME NUMBER FORM
German composer, director of the WDR electronic music studio from 1963, a central figure of postwar serialism and electronic music.
TIME FORM
François J. Bonnet's recording alias — composer and, since 2018, director of GRM.
Richard Pinhas, Merzbow ALBUM 2008
2008 live duo recording between Richard Pinhas and Merzbow, made in Tokyo in 2007.
1940
English tabletop guitarist and painter, a founding member of AMM and a central figure of electroacoustic improvisation.
INSTRUMENTS
American composer; taught at Illinois, UCSD, and Iowa, director of the University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios.
LANGUAGE
American ambient musician and engineer who began prototyping Serge circuits in the mid-1970s and later became chief engineer at Sound Transform Systems.
INSTRUMENTS
Peter Liechti FILM 1989
Peter Liechti's 1989 film portrait of eastern Switzerland built around Voice Crack's junk-electronics music.
INSTRUMENTS
Japanese noise musician, co-founding member of Merzbow until 1989, since pursuing a solo career in electronic noise and field recording.
Herbert Brün COMPOSITION 1962
Klänge Unterwegs (Wayfaring Sounds)
Herbert Brün's 1961–62 electronic composition, made at the Siemens-Studio für elektronische Musik.
1947
German electronic musician, a founding figure of the Berlin School alongside a solo discography of more than 60 albums.
TIME
Norwegian-Swedish composer; director of Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm and creator of the MusicBox composition software.
COMPUTATION
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.
INSTRUMENTS
Korg INSTRUMENT
Korg's 1978 patchable monophonic analog synth, known for its aggressive, near-self-oscillating dual filters.
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.
INSTRUMENTS MEMORY
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.
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.
TIME COMPUTATION 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 INSTRUMENTS
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 LANGUAGE
Richard Pinhas, Gilles Deleuze ALBUM 1982
Richard Pinhas' 1982 album featuring Gilles Deleuze's spoken voice, reissued by Bureau B in 2019.
CYBERNETICS LANGUAGE
François Bayle ALBUM 1972
François Bayle's large-scale cycle of acousmatic works composed between 1969 and 1972.
PERCEPTION 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.
American composer, pioneer of minimalism, sustained drone, and just intonation.
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.
Sonny Sharrock, Peter Brötzmann, Bill Laswell, Ronald Shannon Jackson ALBUM 1986
The self-titled 1986 debut of the free-jazz/noise group Last Exit.
American composer and pioneer of computer music and algorithmic composition.
TIME COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Pierre Schaeffer ALBUM 1975
Pierre Schaeffer's final work, composed entirely from synthetic sounds — his only purely electronic piece.
John Bischoff, Jim Horton, Rich Gold, Tim Perkis, Paul DeMarinis, David Behrman
League of Automatic Music Composers
Pioneering late-1970s Bay Area ensemble performing live music with a network of microcomputers.
COMPUTATION FEEDBACK INSTRUMENTS
David Behrman ALBUM 1987
David Behrman's 1987 album with Rhys Chatham, Ben Neill, and Takehisa Kosugi.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
American composer and chemist; pioneer of computer-composed music, founder of the University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios.
NUMBER FORM COMPUTATION
ORGANIZATION
CEMAMu's successor name, running production and training on the UPIC system through the 1980s.
COMPUTATION
David Griesinger, Lexicon HARDWARE
Lexicon's 1978 digital reverberator, among the first commercially viable digital reverbs.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS SPACE
David Griesinger, Lexicon HARDWARE
Lexicon's 1986 reverb processor, an industry standard for studio reverb.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS SPACE
Lexicon HARDWARE
Lexicon's early digital delay unit, designed explicitly for musical effects.
TIME COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Richard Chartier ORGANIZATION
American label founded by Richard Chartier, documenting minimalist sound art and composition.
PERCEPTION
Musica Elettronica Viva, AMM ALBUM 1970
Live Electronic Music Improvised
1970 split LP pairing live improvisations by Musica Elettronica Viva and AMM.
INSTRUMENTS
American pioneers of electronic music who built circuits as living, dying sound.
INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
Dutch composer; co-founder of STEIM, leading figure of The Hague school.
French composer, co-founder of the GRM, pioneer of anecdotal music and unedited field recording.
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.
INSTRUMENTS
Joseph Roemer, Rodger Stella
American harsh noise project founded in Pittsburgh in 1990 by Joseph Roemer and Rodger Stella.
American composer, flutist, and sound engineer; co-director of the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music, 1992–2018.
INSTRUMENTS
Susumu Yokota ALBUM 1998
Susumu Yokota's 1998 debut album, originally a limited edition of 500 CDs.
Merzbow ALBUM 1995
Merzbow's 1995 album, its track titles drawn from the writings of Athanasius Kircher.
1925
American jazz pianist and composer, Billie Holiday's regular accompanist and a longtime duo partner of Steve Lacy.
TIME
Raymond Scott ALBUM 2000
Basta Audio Visuals' 2000 two-CD anthology of Raymond Scott's unreleased electronic recordings, 1953-1969.
INSTRUMENTS
1968
German composer and producer working across electronic music, sound installation, and electroacoustic improvisation.
COMPUTATION TUNING
British artist and musician working with algorithmic composition, rhythm, and microtonal synthesis.
TIME COMPUTATION TUNING
German computer musician and glitch-music pioneer, recording as Oval and as half of Microstoria.
COMPUTATION
Composer of structure-borne sound and otoacoustic-emission works; large-scale architectural and perceptual sound.
PERCEPTION SPACE
1956
Japanese noise musician, founder of Merzbow in 1979, and prolific solo artist under his own name.
Maso Yamazaki
Maso Yamazaki's Osaka noise project, known for destructive, often seconds-long live performances.
Miller Puckette, Cycling '74 SOFTWARE
Visual programming language for music and multimedia, created by Miller Puckette at IRCAM.
COMPUTATION LANGUAGE
American engineer at Bell Labs who wrote MUSIC, the first widely used computer program for generating sound.
COMPUTATION LANGUAGE
Maurizio Bianchi
Maurizio Bianchi's Italian industrial/noise project, active 1979–1983 and resumed in 1998.
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.
TIME INSTRUMENTS
Ramon Bauer, Andi Pieper, Peter Meininger, Peter Rehberg ORGANIZATION
Vienna experimental electronic label, 1994-2005, foundational to glitch and digital noise.
American composer; founded the electronic music program at the University of North Texas in 1962.
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
Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum
Musica Elettronica Viva — Rome electroacoustic improvisation ensemble, founded 1966 by Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum.
INSTRUMENTS
Irish/English composer and ecologist; treats unprocessed bioelectrical signals from plants and fungi as sound sources.
1952
German electronic musician, member of Agitation Free and briefly Tangerine Dream, later a Hollywood film and television composer.
American ambient/space-music composer and film sound designer, a founding figure of the Californian space music scene.
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.
PROTOCOL
Musical Instrument Digital Interface, the 1983 protocol for communication between electronic instruments.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS LANGUAGE
PROTOCOL
MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE)
An extension convention over MIDI enabling independent per-note expressive control.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS LANGUAGE
American trumpeter and bandleader; central to the development of modal jazz and jazz fusion.
TIME
Free-jazz percussionist and researcher into rhythm, the heartbeat, and the body.
TIME COMPUTATION PERCEPTION
Achim Szepanski ORGANIZATION
German label founded 1994 by Achim Szepanski, a primary vector for philosophy-inflected glitch, microsound, and IDM.
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.
INSTRUMENTS
1916
American composer and theorist who extended twelve-tone method into total serialism and pioneered composition with the RCA Mark II.
NUMBER FORM
Robert Moog, Moog Music INSTRUMENT
Moog Music's 1971 compact synthesizer, the archetype for the electronic keyboard.
INSTRUMENTS
Klaus Schulze ALBUM 1977
Klaus Schulze's 1977 album, a darker, choir-and-synthesizer-textured entry in his run of Berlin School records.
INSTRUMENTS
Dutch pianist and composer; co-founder of the Instant Composers Pool and STEIM.
Shohei Iwasaki
Shohei Iwasaki's Osaka noise project, active from among the earliest years of Japan's noise scene until his death in 2005.
David Tudor ALBUM
David Tudor's previously unreleased recordings, made in India in 1969 and reworked at a New York club a decade later.
INSTRUMENTS
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.
INSTRUMENTS
American composer and Buchla synthesizer pioneer, best known for Silver Apples of the Moon.
INSTRUMENTS
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.
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.
Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell ALBUM 1970
Continuation of the Cherry/Blackwell Mu sessions, recorded in Paris and released on BYG Records in 1970.
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.
PERCEPTION
Hiroshi Yoshimura ALBUM 1982
Hiroshi Yoshimura's 1982 debut album, home-recorded, that helped define kankyo ongaku (environmental music).
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.
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.
Max Mathews LANGUAGE
Max Mathews's 1968 computer music language, the most widely disseminated of the MUSIC-N series.
COMPUTATION LANGUAGE
Iannis Xenakis COMPOSITION 1978
Xenakis's 1978 work, the first piece ever composed on the UPIC system.
FORM COMPUTATION LANGUAGE
American experimental collective behind the 1991 'U2' single lawsuit and the term 'culture jamming.'
LANGUAGE
Klaus Dinger, Michael Rother 1971
Düsseldorf krautrock duo of Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, formed 1971 after both left Kraftwerk.
TIME
Neu!, Conny Plank ALBUM 1972
Neu!'s 1972 self-titled debut, recorded with Conny Plank and the record that introduced the 'motorik' beat.
TIME
David Tudor COMPOSITION 1992
David Tudor's late live-electronic work built from feedback networks.
FEEDBACK INSTRUMENTS
Cameron Jones, Sydney Alonso ORGANIZATION
American digital instrument manufacturer, 1976–1993, maker of the Synclavier.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Toshiro Mayuzumi, Makoto Moroi ORGANIZATION
Tokyo broadcaster's electronic music studio, completed 1954, modeled on WDR's Cologne studio.
American composer and sound artist trained by Alvin Lucier, David Behrman, and David Tudor; a pioneer of microcomputers in live performance.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Toshimaru Nakamura ALBUM 2000
Toshimaru Nakamura's 2000 debut solo album, introducing the self-devised feedback instrument that gives it its title.
FEEDBACK
Milford Graves, Don Pullen ALBUM 1967
Milford Graves and Don Pullen's self-released 1967 duo recording.
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.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
Steve Reid, The Legendary Master Brotherhood ALBUM 1976
Steve Reid's 1976 debut LP with The Legendary Master Brotherhood, launching his Mustevic Sound label.
Portuguese musician known for Plux Quba, a singular work of miniature electronic and acoustic sound-collage.
PERCEPTION
Steven Stapleton, John Fothergill, Heman Pathak
Steven Stapleton's project, formed in London in 1978, foundational to industrial and avant-garde music.
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
David Behrman ALBUM 1978
David Behrman's 1978 debut album, a pioneering work of computer music pairing a KIM-1 microcomputer with live players.
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.
PERCEPTION TUNING
CNMAT PROTOCOL
A network-based protocol for communication between sound and media applications, developed at CNMAT.
COMPUTATION LANGUAGE
Daphne Oram ORGANIZATION
Daphne Oram's independent studio, founded 1959 after leaving the BBC, at Tower Folly in Kent.
David Jackman's long-running project of dense, ritualistic drone built from acoustic and processed sources.
PERCEPTION
American saxophonist and composer, developer of harmolodics and a founding figure of free jazz.
TIME FORM
1959
Japanese guitarist, turntablist, and composer, leader of Ground Zero and a central figure of Japanese free improvisation.
1900
German-American composer and conductor who began collaborating with Vladimir Ussachevsky on tape music in 1952 and co-founded Columbia-Princeton.
Bill Laswell, Pete Namlook ALBUM 2023
Bill Laswell and Pete Namlook's 2023 album on Cold Spring.
Tony Conrad, Faust ALBUM 1973
Tony Conrad and Faust's 1973 landmark of sustained-tone drone minimalism.
TIME
Oval ALBUM 2001
Oval's 2001 album, marking a shift from CD-skip glitch toward more constructed digital composition.
Roger Schönauer, Ewald Weber, Ralf Wehowsky, Stefan E. Schmidt, Gerd Poppe, Achim Szepanski 1980
German experimental/industrial group formed 1980, working in tape manipulation and musique concrète.
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.
Mika Vainio, Ilpo Väisänen
Finnish duo making minimal, physically intense electronic music from custom-built oscillators and pulse generators.
INSTRUMENTS
American synthesist who brought a Moog modular into Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band and co-founded Different Fur Recording Studio.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
1948
American sound and installation artist, a member of the League of Automatic Music Composers who works with obsolete audio technologies.
COMPUTATION MEMORY
Phillip B. Klingler
Phillip B. Klingler's noise/drone project, active since 1986, moving from visual art and mail art into electroacoustic composition.
Robert Breer, Frosty Myers, Robert Whitman, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, Lowell Cross, Fujiko Nakaya, Tony Martin, Ardison Phillips, Pauline Oliveros, John Pierce, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) INSTALLATION 1970
Artist-designed and -programmed environment for Expo '70, created by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).
SPACE PERCEPTION
David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, Fred Waldhauer INTERFACE 1970
Pepsi Pavilion Sound Modifier Console
The playable control surface on the Pepsi Pavilion floor, letting an operator route, modulate, and spatially distribute sound live across the dome's 37 speakers.
TIME INSTRUMENTS SPACE
David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, Fred Waldhauer SYSTEM 1970
The Pepsi Pavilion's 37-channel, dome-mounted sound-processing and spatial-distribution system, designed by David Tudor with Gordon Mumma and Fred Waldhauer.
INSTRUMENTS SPACE
Terry Riley, Patrick Gleeson ALBUM 1972
Terry Riley's 1972 double LP of two long electric-organ improvisations, drawing on his study of Hindustani classical music.
TIME TUNING
German ambient musician and founder of the FAX label, prolific across solo work and long-running collaborative series.
British musician and designer known as 'Sleazy' — Hipgnosis album-cover artist, founding member of Throbbing Gristle, and co-founder of Coil.
PERCEPTION
Slovak composer; co-founder and artistic director of the Experimental Studio of Czechoslovak Radio.
British-Austrian musician (as Pita) and label head, joined Mego in 1995 and founded its successor Editions Mego in 2006.
British engineer, co-founder of Electronic Music Studios (EMS).
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
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.
TIME PERCEPTION
Tangerine Dream ALBUM 1974
Tangerine Dream's 1974 album, the record that established the sequencer-driven Berlin School sound.
TIME
American tenor saxophonist known for overblown, multiphonic playing and spiritual jazz, closely associated with John Coltrane's late work.
TIME
CONCEPT
Generating FM-like timbres by modulating an oscillator's phase rather than its frequency directly.
TIME COMPUTATION
Henri de Bellescize CONCEPT
A feedback circuit that continuously adjusts an oscillator's phase and frequency to match a reference signal.
TIME DYNAMICS FEEDBACK
PLACE
Philips Research Laboratories Electronic Music Studio
Eindhoven facility where Varèse realized Poème électronique for the 1958 Philips Pavilion.
CONCEPT
Simulating the physical behavior of a real instrument's vibrating and resonating parts to generate its sound.
DYNAMICS COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Michael Stearns ALBUM 1981
Michael Stearns' 1981 analog space-music album, made on a Serge modular synthesizer.
INSTRUMENTS
Nuno Canavarro ALBUM 1988
Nuno Canavarro's 1988 album of miniature, dreamlike electronic and acoustic sound-collage.
Józef Patkowski, Józef Patkowski ORGANIZATION
Polish Radio Experimental Studio
Warsaw electronic music studio founded 1957, one of Europe's first.
Wolfgang Palm, PPG INSTRUMENT
PPG's 1981 wavetable synthesizer, combining analog signal paths with digital oscillators.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS MEMORY
Wolfgang Palm, PPG HARDWARE 1982
Wolfgang Palm's 1982 companion computer for the PPG Wave series, for waveform drawing, sampling, and digital editing.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS MEMORY
PLACE
Columbia University building on 125th Street that housed the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center's studios.
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.
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.
COMPUTATION
Steve Lacy, Steve Potts, Jean-Jacques Avenel, Irene Aebi, Bobby Few, Oliver Johnson, George Lewis ALBUM 1983
The Steve Lacy Seven's 1983 double LP, recorded live at IRCAM's Espace de Projection.
Pete Namlook, Bill Laswell ALBUM
A collection of the five Psychonavigation albums by Pete Namlook and Bill Laswell, originally released 1994-2002.
Masahiko Togashi, Masayuki Takayanagi ALBUM 1983
1983 free-improvisation duo album pairing percussionist Masahiko Togashi with guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi.
INSTRUMENTS
Merzbow ALBUM 1996
Merzbow's 1996 album, live noise concrète made entirely with a fuzz box and no overdubs.
John McGuire COMPOSITION 1978
John McGuire's 1978-79 phase-based electronic work, realized at the West German Radio electronic music studio.
TIME NUMBER
Miller Puckette SOFTWARE
Open-source visual programming language for music, Miller Puckette's successor to Max.
COMPUTATION LANGUAGE
Pythagoron ALBUM 1977
The sole, privately issued 1977 album from Pythagoron, sold via mail-order as sound for altering brainwave states.
PERCEPTION
Devo, Brian Eno, Conny Plank ALBUM 1978
Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!
Devo's 1978 debut album, produced by Brian Eno, a founding document of American new wave.
Canadian composer who founded the World Soundscape Project and the field of acoustic ecology.
PERCEPTION SPACE
Keith Rowe, Thomas Lehn, Marcus Schmickler ALBUM 2003
2003 trio album by Keith Rowe, Thomas Lehn, and Marcus Schmickler, recorded at Piethopraxis, Cologne.
INSTRUMENTS
Kraftwerk ALBUM 1975
Kraftwerk's 1975 concept album built around radio and radioactivity.
Patrick Gleeson ALBUM 1980
Patrick Gleeson's 1980 electronic-jazz album, recorded at his own Different Fur studio.
INSTRUMENTS
Merzbow ALBUM 1990
Merzbow's 1990 album, condensed from roughly 21 hours of raw material recorded 1987-1990.
David Tudor COMPOSITION 1968
David Tudor's series of works in which sounds are given physical form through resonating objects.
INSTRUMENTS SPACE
Kraftwerk ALBUM 1973
Kraftwerk's 1973 third album, the group's first to feature the vocoder and a step toward its classic electronic sound.
Gary Mundy, Anthony di Franco, Stuart Dennison, Philip Best
UK power electronics and noise-rock group founded by Gary Mundy in 1982.
American drummer; a progenitor of free jazz drumming, John Coltrane's late-period drummer.
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.
American inventor of the first print-to-speech reading machine, who went on to found Kurzweil Music Systems with Stevie Wonder.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
American composer and inventor who built early machines for automatic music composition.
TIME COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Harry F. Olson, Herbert Belar, RCA INSTRUMENT
The first programmable electronic synthesizer, installed at Columbia-Princeton in 1957-59.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Steve Birchall ALBUM 1973
Steve Birchall's 1973 private-press synthesizer album, recorded on a VCS-3 and 16-track tape.
INSTRUMENTS
C.C.C.C. ALBUM 1991
C.C.C.C.'s 1991 cassette, a Kobe studio session by two members plus a later full-group live recording.
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 FEEDBACK
Incapacitants ALBUM 1989
Incapacitants' 1989 vinyl debut, an uncompromising noise record for its time.
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.
TIME
French guitarist and electronic musician, founder of Heldon, working at the intersection of rock and cybernetic theory.
CYBERNETICS
American composer and synthesizer pioneer, co-founder of Musica Elettronica Viva.
PERCEPTION INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
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.
INSTRUMENTS
Barry Truax COMPOSITION 1986
Barry Truax's 1986 composition, the first electroacoustic work built from real-time granular synthesis.
COMPUTATION TIME
American composer of television operas and pioneer of speech-based electronic music.
LANGUAGE TIME
American instrument designer who built the first sample-based drum machine, the Linn LM-1, and later designed the Akai MPC60.
COMPUTATION 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.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS MEMORY
Composer who utilized cybernetic frameworks.
MORPHOGENESIS DYNAMICS CYBERNETICS
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.
INSTRUMENTS
American composer working in live electronics, a student of Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University.
American drummer who passed through Albert Ayler's, Ornette Coleman's, and Cecil Taylor's bands before co-founding Last Exit.
TIME
Jean Piché COMPOSITION 1980
Jean Piché's piece for percussion and tape, the most agitated work on his 1982 album Heliograms.
Don Cherry, Jean Schwarz ALBUM 1977
Don Cherry and Jean Schwarz's 1977 duo recording, released by Transversales Disques.
Japanese artist working with sine tones, data, and mathematics as sound and image.
NUMBER COMPUTATION PERCEPTION
1973
Japanese musician who plays only a sampler's internal test tones, a central figure of Tokyo's onkyo scene.
INSTRUMENTS
Susumu Yokota ALBUM 1999
Susumu Yokota's 1999 album of dense, sample-woven ambient composition.
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.
INSTRUMENTS
Japanese composer and co-founder of Sound Process, a key voice in kankyo ongaku (environmental music).
SPACE PERCEPTION
Steve Lacy, Roswell Rudd, Henry Grimes, Denis Charles ALBUM 1963
A 1963 live set of Thelonious Monk repertoire by Steve Lacy's quartet, released for the first time in 1975.
Barry Truax ALBUM 1985
Barry Truax's 1985 LP of four I Ching-inspired electroacoustic pieces, the inaugural release on his own Cambridge Street Records.
COMPUTATION TIME
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.
FORM NUMBER
Masahiko Togashi, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden ALBUM 1979
Session in Paris Vol. 1: Song of Soil
Masahiko Togashi's 1979 Paris trio recording with Don Cherry and Charlie Haden, reissued by Wewantsounds.
Herbie Hancock, Patrick Gleeson ALBUM 1973
Herbie Hancock's 1973 album, the Mwandishi sextet's densest electronic fusion, built around Patrick Gleeson's ARP 2600.
INSTRUMENTS
Jean-Claude Eloy ALBUM 1972
Jean-Claude Eloy's expansive electroacoustic work, realized 1972-73 at the WDR studio under Stockhausen's direction.
TIME
Violent Onsen Geisha ALBUM 1989
Violent Onsen Geisha's 1989 cassette, noise built from techno, pop samples, hip hop, and family recordings.
Terry Riley ALBUM 1980
Terry Riley's 1980 album of just-intonation electric organ and tape delay, drawing on Indian classical music.
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.
INSTRUMENTS
John Cage BOOK 1961
Silence: Lectures and Writings
John Cage's foundational collection on indeterminacy, silence, and the sounds of the world.
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.
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.
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.
INSTRUMENTS
Masahiko Ohno, Katsumi Sugahara
Masahiko Ohno's Osaka noise project, built around multi-necked electric guitars of his own construction.
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.
INSTRUMENTS
American guitarist who brought free jazz's harmonic freedom to the electric guitar, without recourse to distortion as a crutch.
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.
Albert Ayler ALBUM 1965
Albert Ayler's 1965 trio album with Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray, recorded for ESP-Disk'.
Masayuki Takayanagi, Motoharu Yoshizawa, Sabu Toyozumi, Mototeru Takagi ALBUM 1970
Station '70: Call in Question / Live Independence
Previously unreleased 1970 recordings by Masayuki Takayanagi's New Direction trio, first issued in 2022.
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.
INSTRUMENTS
American soprano saxophonist who brought the instrument back into modern jazz, and a performer with Musica Elettronica Viva.
American ambient/electronic composer known for slow-evolving synthesizer drone and desert-inspired soundscapes.
TIME SPACE
American artist and musician who coined "lowercase" sound, working with quiet, found, and object-based sources.
PERCEPTION
American musician whose 'classic period' albums pioneered TONTO's layered synthesizer textures, and who later co-founded Kurzweil Music Systems.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Satoshi Ashikawa ALBUM 1982
Satoshi Ashikawa's 1982 environmental-music album, the second release in the Wave Notation series.
SPACE PERCEPTION
John Chowning COMPOSITION
John Chowning's 1977 tape piece, its FM synthesis and structure built entirely on the golden ratio.
COMPUTATION NUMBER TUNING
Pierre Schaeffer, Jacques Copeau ORGANIZATION
Wartime French radio studio founded 1942, ancestor of the GRM lineage.
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.
INSTRUMENTS
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.
INSTRUMENTS
Flo Menezes ORGANIZATION
Brazilian electroacoustic music studio founded 1994 by Flo Menezes, now at São Paulo State University.
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.
CONCEPT
Shaping a harmonically rich source waveform by filtering out frequencies, rather than building a tone up from nothing.
COMPUTATION
1914
American jazz composer and bandleader, an early adopter of electronic keyboards and synthesizers and a pioneer of Afrofuturism.
INSTRUMENTS
James McCartney SOFTWARE
Audio synthesis and algorithmic composition language created by James McCartney in 1996.
COMPUTATION LANGUAGE
Hiroshi Yoshimura ALBUM 1986
Hiroshi Yoshimura's 1986 album of environmental keyboard music.
SPACE PERCEPTION
Japanese electronic musician moving fluidly between techno, ambient, and sample-based composition.
PERCEPTION
American composer and Buchla synthesist, and a pioneering sound designer for corporate and commercial media.
INSTRUMENTS
Heinrich Strobel ORGANIZATION
Freiburg studio for live electronics, founded 1971 within the Heinrich Strobel Foundation.
ORGANIZATION
American software company founded 1989/90 by Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel, makers of Kyma.
COMPUTATION
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.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Synclavier Digital INSTRUMENT
Synclavier Digital's 2022 desktop synthesizer, an enhanced Synclavier II engine spanning additive, subtractive, FM, and sample-based synthesis.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS MEMORY
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
Günter Müller, Voice Crack, Jim O'Rourke ALBUM 1997
1997 trio session between Günter Müller, Voice Crack, and Jim O'Rourke, recorded at Zack Studio, St. Gallen.
Edgar Froese, Conrad Schnitzler
German electronic group founded by Edgar Froese in 1967, pioneers of sequencer-driven Berlin School electronic music.
TIME INSTRUMENTS
Roland Kayn ALBUM 1985
Roland Kayn's large-scale work of self-organizing 'cybernetic music'.
FORM MORPHOGENESIS DYNAMICS CYBERNETICS
American composer central to minimalism, tape delay, and just-intonation improvisation.
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.
TIME TUNING
Japanese ambient musician known for dense, textural electronic soundscapes, including collaborations on FAX.
PERCEPTION
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.
INSTRUMENTS
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.
INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
Irdial-Discs ALBUM 1997
A 1997 compilation of recorded shortwave numbers-station transmissions, released by Irdial-Discs.
TIME LANGUAGE
Klaus Schulze, Pete Namlook ALBUM 1994
The 1994 debut collaboration between Klaus Schulze and Pete Namlook on FAX, dedicated to Bob Moog and the start of an eleven-volume series.
Delia Derbyshire, Barry Bermange COMPOSITION 1964
Delia Derbyshire's 1964 radiophonic sound collage of dream accounts, made with writer Barry Bermange.
PERCEPTION LANGUAGE
Laurie Spiegel ALBUM 1980
Laurie Spiegel's landmark of algorithmic composition made on the GROOVE system at Bell Labs.
TIME FORM COMPUTATION
GX Jupitter-Larsen's long-running noise and destruction-art project, active since the late 1970s.
Government Alpha ALBUM 1994
The Human Race Was Restored to Life Repeatedly
Government Alpha's 1994 cassette, a pivotal document of Yasutoshi Yoshida's early hands-on approach to noise.
FEEDBACK
David B. Doty BOOK 1993
David B. Doty's practical introduction to the theory and practice of just intonation.
TUNING NUMBER
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 FEEDBACK INSTRUMENTS
Mal Waldron, Steve Lacy, Reggie Workman, Andrew Cyrille ALBUM 1995
The Mighty Warriors: Live in Antwerp
A 1995 live recording of Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy's quartet, released in 2024.
Richard Rupenus, Philip Rupenus 1982
British noise duo, founded early 1980s, whose Changez les Blockeurs is widely cited as the first true noise record of the modern era.
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.
PERCEPTION SPACE
Jon Appleton COMPOSITION
The Sweet Dreams of Miss Pamela Beach
Jon Appleton electronic composition from his work developing the Synclavier at Dartmouth.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
Alvin Curran ALBUM 1976
Alvin Curran's 1976 solo album, part of New World Records' Solo Works: The '70s compilation.
La Monte Young's drone ensemble, formed in New York in 1962, later known as The Dream Syndicate.
TIME TUNING
1979
Dutch sound artist working primarily on the Serge modular synthesizer, exploring psychoacoustic phenomena through deliberate misuse of equipment.
PERCEPTION INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
German analog synthesist known for improvised performance on the EMS Synthi A.
INSTRUMENTS
Prolific Icelandic composer who studied under Lejaren Hiller and Kenneth Gaburo at the University of Illinois.
Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter Christopherson, Chris Carter
British industrial group pioneering industrial music and culture.
American self-taught composer of musique concrète, working outside the institutional studios of his European peers.
Thomas Lehn, Gerry Hemingway ALBUM 1999
1999 duo album pairing Thomas Lehn's analog synthesizer with Gerry Hemingway's drums and percussion.
INSTRUMENTS
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.
INSTRUMENTS
American violinist, filmmaker, and composer, a member of the Theatre of Eternal Music from 1964 to 1966.
TIME TUNING
English percussionist central to free improvisation; co-founder of Incus Records.
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.
1962
Japanese musician who abandoned guitar in 1998 for the self-invented no-input mixing board, a central figure of the onkyo scene.
INSTRUMENTS FEEDBACK
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.
TIME NUMBER FORM
PLACE
Converted oast house in Fairseat, Kent, housing Daphne Oram's independent studio from 1959.
SPACE
Organum ALBUM 1985
1985 Organum LP of dense, ritualistic drone on L.A.Y.L.A.H. Antirecords.
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.
TIME SPACE
François Bayle ALBUM 1978
François Bayle's acousmatic works from 1978 and 1979, reissued by Recollection GRM.
SPACE
Éliane Radigue ALBUM 1998
Éliane Radigue's three-part electronic meditation on death and passage.
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.
TIME TUNING
Steven Stapleton, John Fothergill ORGANIZATION
Steven Stapleton's label, founded to release Nurse With Wound and related experimental music.
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.
Erkki Kurenniemi ORGANIZATION
University of Helsinki Electronic Music Studio
Finland's first electronic music studio, built by Erkki Kurenniemi from 1962.
INSTRUMENTS
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.
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.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS
ORGANIZATION
University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio
Canadian electronic music studio built around a bank of twelve keyboard-controlled oscillators.
INSTRUMENTS
Patrick Saint-Jean, Iannis Xenakis INSTRUMENT
Xenakis's graphic composition system, translating tablet drawings directly into sound.
FORM COMPUTATION LANGUAGE
Emerald Web ALBUM
Valley of the Birds (Remastered)
Emerald Web's synthesizer duo album, remastered.
INSTRUMENTS
Michio Teshima ORGANIZATION
Kyoto noise label run by Michio Teshima, an early hub for the Japanese noise scene's key acts, 1989–1995.
Organum, Eddie Prévost ALBUM 1994
1994 Organum CD on Matchless Recordings, limited to 1,500 copies.
Richard Pinhas, Merzbow, Wolf Eyes ALBUM 2012
A spontaneous live collaboration between Richard Pinhas, Merzbow, and Wolf Eyes, recorded at FIMAV 2011.
Masaya Nakahara
Masaya Nakahara's Tokyo noise project, active from 1988 alongside his work as a writer and, later, actor.
1911
Russian-American composer, tape-music pioneer, and founding director of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.
Swiss duo (Andy Guhl and Norbert Möslang) performing with cracked everyday electronics.
INSTRUMENTS
Iannis Xenakis COMPOSITION 1989
Voyage absolu des Unari vers Andromède
Electroacoustic work by Iannis Xenakis.
Charles Tyler Ensemble, Steve Reid ALBUM 1975
Charles Tyler Ensemble's 1975 free-jazz album.
Violent Onsen Geisha ALBUM 1993
Violent Onsen Geisha's 1993 cassette, harsh noise cut with samples of children's songs and family arguments.
Waldorf Music INSTRUMENT
Waldorf's wavetable synthesizer, reviving the PPG Wave lineage with an extensive knob-per-function interface.
COMPUTATION INSTRUMENTS MEMORY
ORGANIZATION
German synthesizer manufacturer founded in 1988 by PPG's former German distributor.
INSTRUMENTS
1949
American-born, Australia-based composer, a pioneer of microtonality and lo-fi live electronics across five decades.
TUNING COMPUTATION
ORGANIZATION
Satoshi Ashikawa's environmental-music imprint on his Sound Process label, home to the three-LP Wave Notation series.
SPACE PERCEPTION
CONCEPT
Reflecting a waveform back on itself once it crosses a threshold, generating additional harmonics.
FORM COMPUTATION
CONCEPT
Storing successive single-cycle waveforms in memory and scanning between them to shape timbre.
TIME COMPUTATION MEMORY
Keith Rowe, Toshimaru Nakamura ALBUM 2001
Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura's 2001 debut duo album, the first of five they made together for Erstwhile Records.
FEEDBACK
American composer and synthesist, pioneer of the Moog synthesizer in recorded music.
TUNING INSTRUMENTS
ORGANIZATION
Modular synthesizer company founded by Grant Richter in 1999, reinterpreting Buchla-derived 'West Coast' ideas in a DIY-accessible format.
INSTRUMENTS
John Cage COMPOSITION 1952
John Cage's 1952–53 tape composition assembled from hundreds of spliced sound fragments organized by chance operations.
TIME
Nate Young, Aaron Dilloway, John Olson
Michigan noise group formed by Nate Young in 1996, later a duo with John Olson.
R. Murray Schafer ORGANIZATION 1969
R. Murray Schafer's research group at Simon Fraser University that founded acoustic ecology.
PERCEPTION SPACE
Xenharmonic community WEBSITE
A deep reference for microtonal music — tunings, temperaments, scales, notation.
NUMBER TUNING
Yasutoshi Yoshida ORGANIZATION
Yasutoshi Yoshida's own label, releasing his Government Alpha noise project since 1992.
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 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 INSTRUMENTS
1951
American percussionist and sound artist (1951-2017), a pioneer of industrial music who built his own instruments from industrial metal and PVC.
INSTRUMENTS SOUND
Dieter Moebius, Conny Plank, Mani Neumeier ALBUM 1983
The 1983 sole album by Moebius-Plank-Neumeier, pitting electronic sequence patterns against Guru Guru drummer Mani Neumeier's live percussion.
TIME
Cluster, Conny Plank ALBUM 1974
Cluster's 1974 album, its rhythmic, synthesizer-and-drum-machine turn recorded after relocating to rural Forst.
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