Pythagoras leads the elitist mathematikoi and akousmatikoi

Guido d’Arezzo’s vowel-to-pitch mapping procedure for composing melodies for texts

Francis Bacon describes the ‘sound-house’ in The New Atlantis

Louis Bertrand Castel builds a prototype clavecin oculaire, the first light organ

Jacques de Vaucanson’s flautist automaton is exhibited

Johann Philipp Kirnberger’s Allezeit fertiger Polonoisen und Menuettencomponist (‘The always ready Polonaise and Menuet Composer’), a musical dice game

Jean-Baptiste Delaborde builds the Claveçin Electrique in Paris

Lady Ada Lovelace describes the possible musical applications for Charles Babbage’s machine in The Sketch of the Analytical Engine

A. Seebeck formulates the rate theory which states that neural firing patterns encode the periodic structure of auditory stimuli

Leon Scott invents the phonoautograph

Innocenzo Manzetti invents a ‘speaking telegraph’ for his musical automaton

Alexander Bell’s (controversial) telephone patent

 Thomas Edison invents the carbon microphone

Co-invention by Charles Cros and Thomas Edison of the phonograph

 Ernst Werner von Siemens invents the loudspeaker

Clément Ader demonstrates stereo broadcast with the premiere of his Théâtrophone, conveying music from the Paris Opéra to the World Expo

Thaddeus Cahill patents the Art of and Apparatus for Generating and Distributing Music Electronically

Valdemar Poulson patents a magnetic Telegraphone, which can both record and play back sound

William Duddell invents the Singing Arc

Cahill finally builds the Telharmonium

 Lee De Forest invents the triode vacuum tube (which he calls the Audion), allowing controlled amplification; ironically, Cahill could have used this invention to make the Telharmonium much smaller!

The Tel-musici Company combine a telephone exchange with a music room; they are bankrupt within a few years, just like Cahill

Luigi Russolo writes his manifesto The Art of Noises

Lev Termen invents the Theremin

Ottorino Respighi combines a phonograph playing alongside an orchestra in Pini di Roma.

Fritz Fleumer invents the magnetic tape recorder in Germany

Maurice Martenot invents the Ondes Martenot

Friedrich Trautwein invents the Trautonium

Walter Ruttman’s Weekend is an early precedent in juxtaposition of fragments of recorded sound,

Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toth hold a multiple turntable concert of Grammophonmusik in Berlin, with young exchange student John Cage in attendance

An electroacoustic montage is created by the sound department of Paramount Studios in Hollywood, for the film Jekyll and Hyde

In Oskar Fischinger’s film, Tönende Ornamente (Ornament Sound), the soundtrack is created by drawing directly onto the optical soundtrack

The theremin is used by composer Max Steiner to expand the timbral palette of the orchestra in the film King Kong

Varèse publishes his manifesto The Liberation of Sound

John Cage delivers his lecture The Future of Music: CREDO

Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio play successfully deceives its audience into believing a Martian invasion is taking place

Johanna Beyer’s Music of the Spheres is composed, with parts for three electrical instruments and two percussion instruments

Cage begins working with live electronic sound in his piece Imaginary Landscape No. 1

Egyptian-born Halim El-Dabh experiments by electronically processing recordings made with a wire recorder, a medium that predated tape

The Schillinger System of Musical Composition is published posthumously

Raymond Scott writes the patent disclosure for the ‘orchestra machine’

At the French National Radio-Television (RTF), Pierre Schaeffer experiments with mixing pre-recorded sources on various turntables and creates Etude aux Chemins de Fer. The RTF studios eventually host the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM)

Claude Elwood Shannon publishes A Mathematical Theory of Communication

Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry compose Symphonie pour un homme seule, a landmark in musique concrète

 The Studio für Elektronische Musik at West German National  Radio (WDR) is founded in Cologne

 Percy Grainger invents the Kangaroo Pouch Machine

The Columbia Tape Music Center, in New York, is started by Luenning and Ussachevsky. It would later become the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1959

Louis and Bebe Barron compose Heavenly Menagerie in their studio, months before the more famous Cologne Studio is established

Bernard Herrmann uses theremins as main instruments with the film orchestra in his score for The Day the Earth Stood Still

Schaeffer investigates spatialisation with the potentiomètre d’espace

Schaeffer publishes a syntax for musique concrète in the treatise Esquisse d’un solfège concrete

Monique Rollin’s Étude Vocale (1952) is an early musique concrète study

Cage is composing Williams Mix (completed by 1953); the realisation takes a team of tape splicers (in reality, Louis and Bebe Barron) many months

In Milan, the Studio di Fonologia is established. In Tokyo the Electronic Music Studio for Japan Radio (NHK) is opened

Herbert Eimert composes Struktur 8

Varèse composes Déserts, which combines an ensemble of live instrumentalists with tape

Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson experiment with using a mainframe computer to algorithmically generate musical scores, composing the Illiac Suite for string quartet in 1956

Iannis Xenakis publishes The Crisis of Serial Music, critiquing integral serialism on psychological and statistical grounds

Louis and Bebe Barron create the first purely electronic film score for Forbidden Planet

In the Netherlands, the Center for Electronic Music is established within the Philips Research Laboratory

Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge combines concrète and elektronische

Xenakis completes the first granular study: Analogue B

In Warsaw, the Studio Experimentalne is established at Polish National Radio

The Bell Telephone Laboratories host the first digital music experiments: Max Mathews programs the first sounds ever generated by a digital computer and creates MUSIC 1, the earliest programming environment for sound synthesis

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop is founded, after years of effort from Daphne Oram in particular

 Xenakis designs the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair for which Varèse composes Poème électronique; Xenakis also provides Concrèt PH for the interludes between shows

 In Santiago de Chile, the Laboratorio de Acústica is used for the earliest electronic music in South America

 Raymond Scott invents and begins development of the  Electronium, an algorithmic composing machine without a musical keyboard

 In Toronto, the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio is founded

Stockhausen works on Kontakte

Andreij Markowski creates, at the Experimental Studio in Warsaw, electronic music and sound design for The Silent Star, directed by Kurt Maetzig

Raymond Scott composes a completely electronic soundtrack for the Vicks: Medicated Cough Drops commercial

The Norsk Rikskringkasting (NRK) in Oslo allows its studios to be used for the earliest experiments in electronic music in Norway

 Kelly and Lochbaum design an algorithm to simulate the human vocal tract

 James Tenney creates the plunderphonic tape piece Collage #1 (Blue Suede), sampling and manipulating a famous Elvis track

In Buenos Aires, the Laboratorio de Música Electrónica associated to the Instituto Torcuato di Tella is founded; in Ghent, Belgium, the Institut vor Psychoakoestiek en Elektronische Muziek; in East Berlin, the Experimentalstudio für Kunstliche Klang und Gerauscherzeugung, Laboratorium für Akustisch-Musikalische Grenzprobleme

Gottfried Michael Koenig’s Projekt 1 program is devised, for automatic aleatoric serial composition

Stockhausen composes Mikrophonie I for amplified and processed tam-tam

 Jean-Claude Risset visits Bell Labs for the first time and uses MUSIC IV to investigate the timbre of trumpets

Steve Reich creates his first phase piece: It’s Gonna Rain

Alvin Lucier creates his Music for Solo Performer, the first live electronics piece to use amplified alpha brainwaves

In Gordon Mumma’s composition Hornpipe an analogue device analyses and amplifies the resonances of the hall in which a performer is playing the French horn, thus predating interactive machine-listening systems

 John Chowning discovers Frequency Modulation sound synthesis

MUSIC V becomes the first computer music programming system to be implemented in FORTRAN

 David Tudor composes the first of his Rainforest pieces, featuring a multitude of objects acting as loudspeakers dangling directly from their cables

 Raymond Scott invents the first ‘drum machine’, Bandito the bongo artist

 Jean-Claude Risset creates a catalogue of computer-generated sounds at Bell Labs including guidelines to synthesise different musical instruments using MUSIC V; Risset also composes Computer Suite from Little Boy, utilising auditory illusions

 Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach achieves popular success, promoting Robert Moog’s modular synthesisers

 Lee Scratch Perry sets up his Upsetter record label – the Jamaican sound system and studio scene is a fertile backdrop for the development of dub and the remix

Max Mathews builds the GROOVE system to connect a computer to an analogue synthesiser

 First performance of Lejaren Hiller and John Cage’s HPSCHD, for massed audiovisual forces

Luc Ferrari’s music promenade manipulated field recording

Pierre Boulez founds the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM)

François Bayle’s L’expérience acoustique

Richard Teitelbaum’s piece Alpha Bean Lima Brain involves the transmission of brain waves by telephone to control jumping beans

 Wendy Carlos creates the electronically instrumental score for A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick

 Hiller and Ruiz develop the first computer simulations by physical models, of instrumental sounds

 John Chowning describes techniques for the computer simulation of moving sound sources that are based on the Doppler effect as well as reverberation effects

 Tonto’s Expanding Head Band release the psychedelic and progressive Zero Time, composed with the expanded Series III Moog synthesiser

Salvatore Martirano builds the SalMar Construction, a realtime generative electronic music instrument.

 F. Richard Moore, Gareth Loy, and others at the Computer Audio Research Laboratory (CARL) at University of California at San Diego develop and distribute an open-source, portable system for signal processing and music synthesis, called the CARL System, modelled after UNIX

 Eduard Artemiev produces the electronic score for Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky

 Pong by Atari becomes a mass gaming phenomenon

The Composers inside Electronics collective is formed

 DJ Kool Herc is experimenting with turntable mixing at parties in the Bronx

Paul De Marinis builds Parrot Pleaser, an automatic music composing circuit intended to be played by a bird

 Curtis Roads writes a program with MUSIC V implementing granular synthesis

 François Bayle establishes the Acousmonium loudspeaker orchestra

Laurie Spiegel develops the VAMPIRE (Video And Music Program for Interactive Realtime Exploration/Experimentation) system

Michel Waisvisz unleashes the Cracklebox synthesiser

 John Appleton produces the prototype for the Synclavier

Denis Smalley writes Darkness After Time’s Colours

The League of Automatic Composers is founded by Jim Horton, John Bischoff and Rich Gold

Ben Burtt coins the term ‘sound designer’ to reflect his contribution to the film Star Wars

Hildegard Westerkamp creates Lighthouse Park Soundwalk

Atari releases the Atari Video Music audio-visualiser

Brian Eno creates the ambient music installation Music for Airports

Kraftwerk create their The Man-Machine album, touring with robotic mannequins

Space Invaders by Toshihiro Nishikado is the first game to have continuous music throughout

Trevor Wishart composes Red Bird: A Political Prisoner’s Dream

Merzbow starts his Lowest Music and Arts record label to release his music on cassette

Fonction d’onde formantique (FOF) sound synthesis (or formant wave function synthesis), is developed at IRCAM by Xavier Rodet, Yves Potard and Jean-Baptiste Barrière

The launch of Music TeleVision; MTV appropriates the existing term VJ for their presenters, starting a parallel use of this descriptor, later fully reclaimed by live club visual artists

Boulez works on Répons

David Jaffe’s Silicon Valley Breakdown utilises an extended version of Karplus-Strong synthesis

The Musical Instruments Digital Interface protocol (MIDI) is established

The Yamaha DX7 is released and becomes the first widely accessible digital synthesiser

Double D and Steinski win a remix competition with the first of their influential cut and paste Lessons

Paul Lansky develops Cmix, later to become RTCmix, an extension for realtime use created by Brad Garton and David Topper

Yasunao Tone begins ‘wounding’ CDs through the application of perforated Scotch tape

First attempts at automatic accompaniment systems from Roger Dannenberg and Barry Vercoe presented at the International Computer Music Conference at IRCAM

The Wabot-2 score reading and keyboard playing robot is completed, the first of a series of musical robots produced at Waseda University

Early Chicago House recordings from Jesse Saunders, amongst others

Laurie Spiegel develops Music Mouse

Paul Lansky’s Idle Chatter

Detroit Techno provides one historical strand amongst many of electronic dance music: Juan Atkins had been recording in the duo Cybotron since 1981, and released his first Model 500 tracks in 1985; influences included electronic, disco and funk artists such as Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder and Parliament

Csound is originally authored by Barry Vercoe and colleagues at the MIT Media Labs

George E. Lewis begins working on the Voyager interactive music system

The Akai S900 becomes one of the first (and possibly the most accessible) commercially available sampling modules for mass consumers

The Hierarchical Music Scoring Language (HMSL) is authored by Polansky, Rosenboom and Burk

Miller Puckette publishes his paper The Patcher; at IRCAM he develops this visual patching system into an interactive computer music programming environment called Max

John Oswald releases the Plunderphonic EP and is later forced to ‘recant’, destroying all remaining copies, by the litigious music industry

Max (later Max/MSP, then later still just Max again) is released commercially, becoming available to non-academic musicians

Public Enemy’s album Fear of a Black Planet demonstrates the power of their sampled hip hop production, allied to strong political messages

Nic Collins creates the piece Broken Light by hardware hacking CD players

Common Lisp Music (or CLM), a sound synthesis language is written by Bill Schottstaedt at Stanford University

Reed Ghazala starts publishing articles on ‘Circuit Bending’ in the journal Experimental Musical Instruments

Björk’s Debut is the first example of her many collaborations with electronic dance music producers

Autechre’s anti-EP (particularly the third track, ‘Flutter’) is designed not to repeat in such a way as to confound recent anti-rave legislation

The Synthesis Toolkit (STK), a collection of building blocks for realtime sound synthesis and physical modelling, for the C++ programming language, is authored by Perry Cook and Gary Scavone

James McCartney develops SuperCollider, an environment and programming language for realtime audio synthesis

Miller Puckette releases Pure Data, a freeware program with a similar environment to Max/MSP

Coldcut release Let Us Play, an extended CD including the live AV sampling demo Timber

Maurice Methot and Hector LaPlante start streaming algorithmic music live on the internet with The Algorithmic Stream

Introduction of the Open Sound Control (OSC) network music connectivity protocol

Ryoji Ikeda releases +/−

Atau Tanaka and Kaspar Toeplitz install Global String, uniting space with cyberspace

The gameboy Nanoloop sequencer is created by Oliver Wittchow

Chris Watson releases Outside the circle of fire

Tabletop tangible musical controllers such as SmallFish and Jam-O-Drum begin to develop; they would be followed by others such as the reactable and the Audiopad

Radiohead’s Kid A openly assimilates electronica influences

Jem Finer’s LongPlayer installation intends to run for a thousand years

Chris Chafe’s Network Harp uses network latency for sound synthesis

ChucK, an audio synthesis programming language, is created by Ge Wang and Perry Cook

The Shazam mobile phone-based automatic music track recognition service is launched

The Firebirds installation by Paul de Marinis reignites the use of gas fire loudspeakers

The Vocaloid singing voice synthesiser software is first released

Nintendo and Toshio Iwai release the Electroplankton interactive musical video game

The Tomb Raider: Legend game widely promotes adaptive audio techniques

Daft Punk’s stage pyramid show is revealed at Coachella

The iPhone is released, paving the way to low latency audio processing smartphone applications

Björk’s Biophilia is both interactive app and music release

The Turner Prize is given to sound artist Susan Philipsz

Amon Tobin’s ISAM stage show maps audio synchronized graphics onto a large on-stage sculpture

The Oramics to Electronica exhibition opens at London’s Science Museum

The HTML 5 specification is finalized; an era of realtime web browser audio applications has already begun

Daphne Oram’s Still Point (1949) for double orchestra, pre-recorded sound and electronic processing via microphones is finally premiered, at the Deep Minimalism Festival in London