San Francisco Tape Music Center

The San Francisco Tape Music Center, or SFTMC, was founded in the summer of 1962[1] by composers Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick as a collaborative, "non profit corporation developed and maintained" by local composers working with tape recorders and other novel compositional technologies, which functioned both as an electronic music studio and concert venue.

[2] Composer Pauline Oliveros,[3] artist Tony Martin and technician William Maginnis eventually joined the SFTMC.

[5] The concert series that also paved the way to the creation of the SFTMC, titled Sonics, was organized by Sender and Pauline Oliveros, a fellow composition student of Robert Erickson.

The first Sonics concert of December 1961 consisted of original tape compositions by Oliveros, Sender, Terry Riley and Philip Winsor as well as a collaborative live improvisations.

It was performed by Riley, Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Morton Subotnick, Warner Jepson and others, while Tony Martin operated the light show or "visual environment".