On or about May 17, 1957, Newman Guttman’s In the Silver Scale, the first piece of computer music, was heard at Bell Telephone Labs in New Jersey.

Amazon.com has all 19 seconds of In the Silver Scale; as music, it’s a nugatory morsel. Yet the history and repercussions of computer music remain largely unknown.

In his memoir "The Education of a Computer Music Composer" published in the latest issue of The Open Space, Hubert Howe hits the nail on the head: "The main value of the work we did then [in the 1960s] was in stating and formulating the problem so that the computer could do meaningful work for us."

Unlike musique concrète which processes and alters recognizable (thus the term "concrète") sounds, computer music entails the digital generation, processing, and (sometimes) composition of sound from human-made instructions.

Computer music spawned the tools vital to almost all of the music made in the last 20 years, regardless of genre: Recording software such as ProTools (though here's some reasons why I hate PT) and Adobe Audition (which I use every day and love) as well as countless plug-ins that compress, reverberate, pitch-correct and just do about anything else (such as physical modeling, convolution, and granular synthesis). Even most of the old 78s reissued on CD have been de-noised (sometimes excessively so in the late 80s/early 90s with the NoNoise system) by algorithms with roots in computer music.

Computer music pioneers include Max Mathews, John R. Pierce, J.K. Randall, James Tenney, and subsequently, Paul Lansky, John Chowning (whose work in FM synthesis spawned the ubiquitous synth of the 1980s, the Yamaha DX-7), Charles Dodge, Laurie Spiegel, and many others.

Richard Karpen, founder the UW's DX Arts program, remains the foremost practitioner locally; pieces such as Eclipse, Terra Infirma, and Il Nome as well as his series of "Life Studies" are all worth seeking out.

To my ears, the classics of the genre started appearing in the late 1960s and 1970s. From that era, check out Paul Lansky's Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion, Sabelithe by John Chowning, Charles Dodge's Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental, and just about everything on the CD Obsolete Systems by Laurie Spiegel.

Today since Csound has fallen out of fashion, most musicians making computer music use SuperCollider and MAX/MSP, though die-hards code their own apps. Renegade variants of computer music also exist, such as databending and chaotic systems hacking.