1971

• Professor Barry Vercoe joined the MIT Music Department faculty.

1973

• EMS was founded by Professor Barry Vercoe.  The original studio was located in the basement of Building 26. Later the studio was moved up to the third floor and occupied the former laboratory of Amar Bose.

• Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) donated a PDP-11/50 computer which became one of the central tools of the studio along with an IMLAC PDS-4 computer.

1976

• Barry Vercoe composed Synapse for viola and computer. It was the first major work to emerge from the EMS. In addition, it was the first music written using the MIT Graphic Score Editor. Synapse is essentially a small viola concerto with orchestra part performed by the computer. The piece was written for respected violist Marcus Thompson.

 
• MIT hosted the first International Conference on Computer Music (ICMC).

1979

• "New Music for Computer," a concert held at MIT's Kresge Auditorium, featured works by Edith Smith (Spinner Web), Richard Boulanger (Trapped in Convert), Pamela Marshall, John Duesenberry, Dexter Morrill and Jean-Claude Rissett. Richard Buell, Globe correspondent, wrote of the affair, "The concert at Kresge Friday night was to show what these 10 composers could create via the rich instrument they were learning about. It was down-to-the-wire, more deadline-racing composing, much of it; even to the afternoon of the concert day."

 
• Technology Review printed special report on the up and coming EMS. "What we're seeing now is the active development of a third medium -- not of mechanically produced sound (like a violin) but of electronically produced sounds." - Majorie Lyon

 
• Peter Child composed Three Brief Impressions for Computer while a participant in the Summer Workshop in Computer Music. Child stayed at the studio as a member of the Graduate Seminar in Composition. Other Summer Workshop participants included John Rimmer and Richard Boulanger.

1980

• February: Washington Post story "Science Meets the Muse In The Arts of the Future" highlights the projects which would form the basis of the Media Lab, scheduled to open five years down the road. "What Vercoe has developed is essentially a communication system. His piano-style keyboard allows composers to use a language they understand and translate it into a language the computer - a sort of ultimate musical instrument - can use." - Joseph Mclellan.

 
• Martin Brody (Moments musicaux) and John Lunn (Echoes) participated in this years Summer Workshop.

• November: A concert review of "Music for Instruments and Computer Processed Sound" appeared in the Boston Globe. Among those reviewed were Elliot D. Balaban's In My Future and Barry Vercoe's Synapse. Richard Buell wrote, "If the listener had had any preconception that computer-generated music is being written today in a single conformist "blip-blip" style, that listener soon heard otherwise."

1981

• A Computer Music Journal (CMJ) review of Barry Vercoe's Synapse noted the musicality of the computer's part. "Its rhythms are fluid and the computer part is fully as flexible and nuanced as Thompson's expressive viola playing."

 
• The New York Times article, "Computers Turn Artistic and the Artists Like It," mentioned the EMS in an analysis of how computers are shaping art. "Computers go a step further, creating sounds that instruments cannot even imitate. One of Professor Vercoe's compositions, for example, includes the sound a gong would make if it were to shrink in size during the course of the note. Computers can also play notes faster than human musicians and maintain more complex rhythms without tiring and without error." - Andrew Pollack

 
• The New Yorker reviewed several EMS concerts and commented upon the status of electronic music. "Today, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Experimental Music Studio, a composer with little experience of the medium can, after a few classes and some private instruction, sit at a computer linked to a digital synthesizer, choose timbres and textures with immense precision from the computer's huge resources, and create a composition." - Nicholas Kenyon

1982

• Barry Vercoe was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship which takes him to Paris to the Institute for Research and Coordination of Acoustics and Music (IRCAM). Simultaneously, the EMS was awarded $1.1 million by the System Development Foundation of Palo Alto.

 
• March: Musica Viva performed Peter Child's Ensemblance, a piece that incorporates computer generated sounds engineered at the EMS.

 
• "Micro Music, Live" brought together EMS performers to support computer music at MIT.

1983

• Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities awarded the EMS a $40,000 grant, and enabled the EMS to commission five new works (by five different composers) combining computer-synthesized sound with live performers. The first of five composers was Graham Hair.

 
• September: Graham Hair described his thoughts on the use of the computer in music to the Boston Globe, "One of the idiomatic characteristics of the computer is that it doesn't have any. ...It's a completely versatile tool."

1984

• Barry Vercoe wrote a computer program called "the Synthetic Performer" which can accompany a human performer. The program detects pitches in a flute performance and compares the notes with a musical score stored in memory. It then analyzes the tempo of the performance and generates an appropriate accompaniment.

 
• March: Charles Dodge's "The Waves" premiered at the "Voicing: Music for Voice and Computer-Processed Sound" concert at MIT's Kresge Auditorium.

 
• June: New York: "New Horizons", a concert of current computer music, included a work by Charles Dodge. It was said the concert was the first since the sixties in New York City to incorporate computers in performance. According to Brook Wentz of CMJ, "The three concert festival of computer music was probably the most eclectic concert ever held in Avery Fisher Hall. It demonstrated the full spectrum of the computer's use in composition and performance."

 
• July: The "Very New Music for Computer and Instruments" concert at Kresge Auditorium showcased eight composers who had participated in the six week Summer Workshop: Toby Mountain, Jon Nelson, Harry Castle, Michael Eckert, David Edelson, Kerry Koitzsch, T. Timothy Lenk and Joel Settel.

1985

• January: MIT's Media Lab opened. Professor Vercoe, one of the Lab's founding faculty, and the EMS staff moved into the new space along with 5 other groups headed by Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert, Nicholas Negroponte, Ricky Leacock and Muriel Cooper.

 
• Barry Vercoe added the "Synthetic Rehearsal" program to the "Synthetic Performer" program written the previous year. This update enabled the computer to "learn" a particular performer's interpretation of a piece and thus accompany the performer more effectively.

 
• February: The "With Strings Attached" concert at MIT showcased explorations between computer's and string instruments. Among the pieces performed were Tod Machover's Electric Etudes for cello, computer and live electronics, Carla Scaletti's Lysogeny for harp and computer, and Paul Lansky's As If for string trio and computer

 
• Spring: Peter Child premiered Thyrsus for orchestra and computer. The Boston Globe commented, "It gave off a nice sense of the rhapsodic contending with the fastidious, and it offered not a moment's boredom."

 
• The "Prestidigitations: Music For Piano and Computer" concert at MIT featured works from William Albright and MIT graduate student Marco Stroppa.

1986

• February: The EMS presented the "IRCAM" concert in Kresge Auditorium (MIT). Composers came from from Great Britain (Stanley Haynes and Jonathan Harvey), Finland (Kaija Saariaho), and the U.S. (Tod Machover).

 
• July: Article in the Christian Science Monitor reports on the frontiers of computer aided music, much of it focused on the EMS. "Composers have many more options than they used to. They can write a piece just for computers alone, for computers and five instruments, or using vocal sounds." -Prof. Barry Vercoe

 
• August: James Dashow's In Winter Shine and Charles Dodge's The Waves were performed at the Festival of Contemporary Music in the Tanglewood Music Center.

1987

• The "New Music for Computer" concert at MIT featured works by composer in residence Jean-Claude Risset, as well as, Madelyn Curtis, Thomas Sullivan, Tom Trobaugh, Takashi Koto, and Nicholas Hopkins.

 
• Composer Anthony Davis debuted song was sweeter even so, realized at the EMS over the summer of 1986. The piece uses digital manipulation of human speech to create a variety of sounds and effects. The Christian Science Monitor reported "The performance of the piece was a fitting finale to an evening of new music works at MIT...."

 
• April: An article in The Economist analyzed the challenge of automated musical accompaniment and the EMS's approach to the problem. "The trouble with playing the flute or the violin - or, come to that, almost any musical instrument except the piano, the harp and the guitar - is that you usually need an accompanist.... In 1984, Dr. Barry Vercoe of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote a computer program called the 'Synthetic Performer'" (see 1984 for more about the "Synthetic Performer")

 
• October: The Washington Post highlighted various projects at the EMS including the "Synthetic Performer" and "Hyperinstruments", a project aimed at reshaping the way sound and music is produced at the performer-instrument interaction level. "And now computer technology is on the verge of freeing the sound of music from virtually all physical limitations and its creation from any formal skills of the composer." - Curt Suplee

1988

• The "Binary Convergence" concert at MIT's Experimental Media Facility featured live computer/performer works by Morton Subotnick, David Arzouman, Javier Albarez, Jonathan Harvey and Mario Davidovsky.

 
• Jonathan Harvey, Professor of Music at Sussex University in England, was composer in residence at the EMS, and creates From Silence .

1989

• Jonathan Harvey's From Silence is premiered in the Experimental Media Facility (the Cube). The concert also included works from James Mobberly, John Chowning, Jean-Claude Risset and Dexter Morril.