Computer Music Center

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The Computer Music Center (CMC) at Columbia University is the oldest center for electronic and computer music research in the United States. It was founded in the 1950s as the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.

The CMC is housed in Prentis Hall, 632 West 125th Street, New York City, across the street from Columbia's 17-acre Manhattanville campus. The facility consists of a large graduate research facility specializing in computer music and multimedia research, as well as composition and recording studios for student use. Projects to come out of the CMC since the 1990s include:

• ArtBots
• dorkbot
• PeRColate
• Real-Time Cmix

The director of the CMC is

The center's flagship piece of equipment, the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer, was delivered in 1957 after it was developed to Ussachevsky and Babbitt's specifications. The RCA (and the center) were re-housed in

Most of the luminaries in the field of electronic music (and avant-garde music in general) visited, worked, or studied at the Electronic Music Center, including Edgard Varèse, Chou Wen-chung, Halim El-Dabh, Michiko Toyama, Bülent Arel, Mario Davidovsky, Charles Dodge, Pril Smiley, Alice Shields, Wendy Carlos, Dariush Dolat-Shahi, Kenjiro Ezaki and Luciano Berio. The center also acted as a consulting agency for other electronic music studios in the Western Hemisphere, giving them advice on optimum studio design and helping them purchase equipment.

The staff engineers at the center under

By the late 1970s the Electronic Music Center was rapidly nearing obsolescence as its classical

The original Columbia facility was re-organized in 1995 under the leadership of Brad Garton and was renamed the Columbia University Computer Music Center. Garton served as Director from 1995 until 2021, when Seth Cluett became Director joined by Anna Meadors as Assistant Director.

• Seth Cluett, Director, Lecturer in Computer Music and Sound Studies
• Anna Meadors, Assistant Director
• Brad Garton, Director Emeritus, Professor of Music
• Miya Masaoka, Director of the Sound Arts MFA Program
• Fred Lerdahl, Professor of Music
• Chou Wen-chung, Professor of Music
• George E. Lewis, Professor of Music
• Zosha Di Castri, Assistant Professor of Music

• "Q&A: electronic music comes of age" (interview with director of research
  ISSN 0028-0836

• Columbia history of the Electronic Music Center
• Ohm site on the Electronic Music Center
• The Computer Music Center, Columbia University
• Princeton Sound Lab
• Obourn, Nick. "Center for Computer Music: 60 Years of Revolutionary Sound". Columbia University. Archived from the original on 2012-01-08. Retrieved 2011-12-22.
• Finding aid to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center records at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.