User:DJdogwalker/San Francisco Tape Music Center

The San Francisco Tape Music Center, founded in 1961 by composers Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick, was a collaborative, “non profit corporation developed and maintained” by local composers working with tape recorders and other novel compositional technologies, which functioned as an electronic music studio and concert venue. Over the course of five years, the Tape Music Center was an active hub for experimental music and interdisciplinary art in the Bay Area. The first concert series associated with the Tape Music Center, titled "Sonics I," was organized by Sender and Pauline Oliveros, a fellow compositional student of Robert Erickson. The Sonics I Concert consisted of original tape compositions created by Oliveros, Sender, Terry Riley and Philip Winsor and live improvisation. The Tape Music Center changed locations two times, first to 1537 Jones Street and then to 321 Divisadero street, before it received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1966 and was transferred to Mills College, where it became the Mills Tape Music Center. At Mills, Oliveros (musical), Tony Martin (visual) and William Maginnis (technical) collectively served as directors for the new tape music center, which is now the Center for Contemporary Music.

San Francisco Conservatory of Music
Before the San Francisco Tape Music Center was officially established, it began as a small music studio built in the attic of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music by Ramon Sender. The studio was minimally equipped and housed little else than the conservatory's two-channel Ampex tape recorder, but Sender and fellow Sonics I composers creatively explored the limitations of the studio by using contact microphones to augment their recordings in an experimental manner.