Pauline Oliveros, "I of IV"

Liner Notes From Odyssey 32 16 0160:

Pauline Oliveros was born in 1932 in Houston, Texas. She studied composition with Robert Erickson and Thomas Nee and was a member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center from 1961 through 1967, working and touring with fellow composers Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender. In 1966, she became Director of the Tape Music Center at Mills College and is currently Lecturer in Electronic Sound at the music department of the University of California at San Diego. She writes of the work presented here:

"I of IV was made in July, 1966, at the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio. It is a real time studio performance composition (no editing or tape splicing), utilizing the techniques of amplifying combination tones and tape repetition. The combination-tone technique was one which I developed in 1965 at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

"The equipment consisted of twelve sine-tone square-wave generators connected to an organ keyboard, two line amplifiers, mixer, Hammond spring-type reverb and two stereo tape recorders. Eleven generators were set to operate above twenty thousand cycles per second, and one generator at below one cycle per second. The keyboard output was routed to the line amplifiers, reverb, and then to channel A of recorder 1. The tape was threaded from recorder 1 to recorder 2. Recorder 2 was on playback only. Recorder 2 provided playback repetition approximately eight seconds later. Recorder 1 channel A was routed to recorder 1 channel B, and recorder 1 channel B to recorder 1 channel A in a double feedback loop. Recorder 2 channel A was routed to recorder 1 channel A, and recorder 2 channel B was routed to recorder 1 channel B. The tape repetition contributed timbre and dynamic changes to steady state sounds. The combination tones produced by the eleven generators and the bias frequencies of the tape recorders were pulse modulated by the sub-audio generator."