Pauline Oliveros - Bye Bye Butterfly

Bye Bye Butterfly (1965) Realized at San Francisco Tape Music Center "I made my own way of making electronic music in the late-’50s, early-’60s, using test equipment — oscillators and patchbays and tape recorders. While everybody else was cutting and splicing materials, I was finding a way to improvise with the electronics. That improvisation system was using difference tones between oscillators. Setting oscillators above the range of hearing and using the difference tones between the oscillators in a tape delay system caused a lot of beat frequencies with the bias of the tape recorder. That’s how I made my early electronic music, like Bye Bye Butterfly. I used large tape recorders with big reels. I’d take the supply reel and run it through the deck and over to another machine, several feet away. Sometimes I think I even ran it through three machines. They would all record, and feed the resulting sound back to the first machine, and the second machine." --Pauline Oliveros Art by Endre Komaromi-Kacz