Long before the twin cities were known for distortion pedals or basement emo, Champaign-Urbana was the undisputed global capital of digital sound synthesis. In the late 1950s through the 1970s, an unlikely alliance between the University of Illinois School of Music and the Department of Computer Science turned Urbana into a playground for radical acoustics. Here, room-sized vacuum-tube mainframes generated the first computer-composed scores, and an eccentric visionary built a 400-pound electronic monolith designed to turn performance into a human-machine dialogue.

---

To stand in front of Salvatore Martirano in the early 1970s was to watch a man attempting to pilot an alien switchboard through open space.

There was no piano bench, no score paper pinned to a wire music stand, and none of the stately decorum of the traditional academy. Instead, towering in the center of the room sat an eight-foot-long, four-hundred-pound steel and aluminum monolith known simply as the Sal-Mar Construction. Its matte-black face was an intimidating labyrinth of hundreds of touch-sensitive brass pads, circuit-switch matrix panels, and blinking LED logic gates.

Behind the console stood Martirano—Rome Prize winner, conservatory-trained composer, and native of upstate New York—hunched forward like a mad transit conductor. He wore his thick-framed glasses pushed up on his nose, fingers hovering an inch above the console’s copper contact plates.

When his fingertips finally made contact, the machine did not merely play a note. It answered.

A dry, fluttering volley of pulses ripped through twenty-four loudspeakers suspended throughout the room, bounding off the brick walls in a pinball arc of spatial velocity. A low, square-wave thrum swelled in the left corner, answered instantly by a shower of bright, metallic clicks that migrated across the ceiling before dissolving into quiet, percussive static. Martirano didn’t play melodies in the traditional Western sense; he adjusted probabilistic pathways. With a series of brisk, decisive taps on the control surface, he opened logic circuits, nudged mathematical iterations, and diverted digital rivers into analog filters.

It was a volatile dialogue between man and machine. The Sal-Mar was hardwired with discarded Transistor-Transistor Logic (TTL) integrated chips salvaged straight from the carcass of the decommissioned ILLIAC II supercomputer at the University of Illinois. It had a primitive, obstinate digital memory of its own. Martirano had not built a programmable synthesizer that simply obeyed commands like a disciplined piano; he had engineered an improvisational partner. If he made a sudden move on the console, the machine responded with its own algorithmic counter-arguments.

“It’s like driving a flying bus,” Martirano once joked to a friend as he wrestled with the controls. “You don’t always know where the curves are, but you have to steer anyway.”

Watching him perform was theater in itself. He titled one of his touring programs with characteristic self-deprecation: “Let’s Look at the Back of My Head for Awhile.” Audiences would sit in the dim glow of the console’s flickering indicator lamps, staring at Martirano’s arched back as his arms danced across the brass points, tossing sound across four dimensions while the circuitry inside hummed with the heat of hundreds of solder joints.

Outside the walls of the studio, the flat central Illinois prairie stretched in every direction toward the horizon—miles of quiet black dirt and cornfields dormant beneath a wide Midwestern sky. But here, inside an attic workshop on Mathews Avenue in Urbana, Salvatore Martirano was coaxing ghosts out of salvage silicon, rewriting the grammar of sound in real time.

Part I: Lejaren Hiller and the ILLIAC I

Before Martirano could build a machine that listened, someone had to teach an electronic brain how to write.

That revolution began in the sterile, ozone-scented belly of the University of Illinois Digital Computer Laboratory in the mid-1950s. At the center of it stood Lejaren Hiller, a man whose resume reads like an intentional disruption of academic silos. Hiller held a doctorate in chemistry from Princeton, where he had worked on synthetic rubber during the tail end of the Manhattan Project era, yet he had concurrently studied music composition under the legendary Milton Babbitt. When the university recruited him to Urbana in 1952, it was as a research chemist investigating the physical behavior of polymer molecules.

To model the chaotic, twisting geometry of long synthetic chains, Hiller turned to the pride of campus: the ILLIAC I.

Constructed in 1952, the ILLIAC was a five-ton titan of early computing, its ten-foot-tall steel racks packed with nearly 3,000 vacuum tubes that radiated enough ambient heat to roast an office. It clattered and hummed with unrelenting intensity, crunching numbers using punch paper tape fed through high-speed photoelectric readers.

Working late nights beside mathematician Leonard Isaacson, Hiller watched the ILLIAC execute Monte Carlo calculations—generating random numbers, testing whether a simulated chemical bond violated physical laws, and either keeping or discarding the coordinate.

To a chemist, it was a computational model of polymer elasticity. To a composer trained in strict serialism and counterpoint, it looked suspiciously like writing music.

Music, Hiller reasoned, was not merely an emotional spasm; it was an architecture governed by strict historical filters. Sixteenth-century counterpoint, after all, was little more than a rigorous set of constraints: no parallel fifths, no unresolved tritones, voices must resolve by step. If a computer could evaluate whether a simulated carbon atom collided with another in three-dimensional space, it could just as easily evaluate whether a musical note collided with the harmonic rules of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.

In 1955, Hiller and Isaacson began writing code that replaced polymer chains with musical intervals.

The ILLIAC could not generate sound—it had no speakers, no audio cards, and no concept of pitch or timbre. Instead, it was an engine of pure numeric syntax. The researchers programmed the computer to generate sequences of pseudo-random numbers representing pitches, rhythms, and dynamic markings. Each candidate note was run through a sieve of algorithmic subroutines. If the number violated a designated rule of composition, the machine rejected it, reached back into its random-number generator, and tried again until it found an integer that cleared the bar.

The resulting output spewed out of the ILLIAC’s perforator as ribbons of narrow paper tape, perforated with rows of five-hole teletype code. Hiller and Isaacson would carry these paper tangles back to their desks, painstakingly translating columns of hexadecimal data into traditional musical notation on five-line staff paper.

By the fall of 1956, their experiments crystallized into the four movements of String Quartet No. 4, soon baptized as the Illiac Suite.

Each movement was a historic snapshot of algorithmic evolution:

• Movement I: Modeled strictly on the classical species counterpoint codified by Johann Joseph Fux, proving the computer could write convincing Renaissance-style polyphony.
• Movement II: Tested four-voice counterpoint with increasingly loosened harmonic restrictions, venturing into chromaticism.
• Movement III: Addressed rhythm and dynamics, generating complex syncopations and experimental rhythmic proportions.
• Movement IV: Pushed into pure twentieth-century stochastic territory, using Markov chains and probability matrices to produce jagged, micro-tonal avant-garde textures.

When a student string quartet premiered the work on campus in the spring of 1957, the shockwaves registered well beyond Champaign County. The traditional music faculty was scandalized; purists decried the suite as an unholy, soulless desecration of human art, while computer scientists marveled at the machine’s unexpected fluency. The national press seized on the spectacle, running breathless headlines about mechanical brains replacing Beethoven.

Hiller was unbothered by the hysteria. He knew the machine hadn’t replaced the composer—it had simply exposed the mathematical blueprint hidden beneath the romance of composition.

Capitalizing on the global attention, Hiller made his definitive move. In 1958, he convinced the university to establish the Experimental Music Studios in the attic of Stiven House on Mathews Avenue. It was the first institutional electro-acoustic research facility of its kind in the Western Hemisphere—a physical space dedicated to the belief that the future of sound lived where mathematics, wires, and human imagination collided.

Part II: The Radical Residency Era & The HPSCHD Spectacle (1959–1969)

By the early 1960s, the Experimental Music Studios in the attic of Stiven House had evolved from an academic curiosity into an international lightning rod. While studios in Paris and Cologne were fiercely dogmatic—the French insisting on musique concrète made from manipulated microphone recordings, the Germans championing pure, test-tone sine-wave synthesis—Urbana became famous for its radical, omnivorous agnosticism. In Hiller’s attic, everything was fair game: razor-spliced magnetic tape, algorithmic mainframe outputs, and homegrown electronic circuitry.

The technical firepower expanded rapidly. In 1964, electrical engineer James Beauchamp—then an EMS researcher—designed and hand-built the Harmonic Tone Generator. It was a massive leap forward: one of the earliest voltage-controlled additive synthesizers in the world, allowing composers to sculpt complex timbres by dialing in up to fifteen independent, harmonically related sine waves. Beauchamp was running parallel to East Coast pioneers like Robert Moog and Don Buchla on the West Coast, but Urbana’s culture was distinctly tied to software and theoretical math. The university was churning out minds who saw computers not as calculators, but as creative instruments.

That reputation reached the ears of the century’s most famous artistic provocateur: John Cage.

In the fall of 1967, Cage arrived in Champaign-Urbana as an associate of the Center for Advanced Study. He had come specifically to learn how to harness the campus’s newest supercomputer, the transistorized ILLIAC II, and dive headfirst into the algorithmic programming Hiller had pioneered. Cage, whose entire artistic philosophy centered on removing human ego and traditional intention from art, realized the computer was the ultimate engine of indeterminate chance.

For nearly two years, Cage and Hiller spent hours in the digital labs, working with programmer Ed Kobrin to write a FORTRAN program called ICHING. The code cross-referenced the ancient Chinese I Ching divination hexagrams with computer logic to determine pitch, duration, timbre, and volume. The resulting audio was then painstakingly rendered on magnetic tape using the ILLIAC II and the university’s IBM 7094 mainframe.

The culmination of this collaboration was not a polite concert hall recital. It was HPSCHD (a phonetic spelling of “harpsichord”), staged on May 16, 1969, inside the cavernous concrete belly of the campus’s Assembly Hall.

It remains one of the largest, most audacious multimedia happenings in modern music history:

• The Sound: Seven amplified harpsichordists—including Neely Bruce and David Tudor—sat on elevated platforms arranged across the arena floor, sight-reading computer-generated transcriptions of Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin laced with chance operations. Surrounding them were fifty-two monaural tape machines playing fifty-one distinct computer-generated microtonal tapes, piped through dozens of amplifiers and speakers hung throughout the rafters.
• The Visuals: The arena was wrapped in sensory overload. Sixty-four slide projectors and eight motion-picture projectors cast a kinetic tempest of 6,400 slides and 40 films onto a 340-foot-wide circular polyethylene screen suspended from the ceiling. Images of NASA space missions, computer flowcharts, Mozart manuscripts, and abstract colored inks washed over the room.
• The Atmosphere: More than 7,000 students, faculty, and visiting artists poured through the turnstiles into the flashing, deafening dark. There were no assigned seats. Audience members brought blankets, danced on the polished concrete floor, and wandered between the harpsichord platforms like pedestrians navigating an electric city. Smells of cheap draft beer and incense mixed with the ozone hum of heavy electronics.

HPSCHD was a watershed. It obliterated the boundary between elite university research and underground youth counterculture, proving that Champaign-Urbana’s high-tech labs could produce something as anarchic, immersive, and wildly populist as any rock festival.

Yet as the dust settled and the massive tape loops were packed away, other faculty members at the EMS were growing restless with mainframe computing. Mainframes were powerful, but they were bureaucratic beasts; you punched your cards, waited hours in line for batch processing, and waited for ribbons of tape to tell you what your ideas sounded like long after the thought had passed.

One of those restless composers was Salvatore Martirano. He didn’t want to wait for batch printouts, and he didn’t want to play prerecorded tapes for passive audiences. He wanted to build an electronic creature he could stand in front of, touch with his bare hands, and argue with in real time.

Part III: The Franken-Brain in the Attic (1969–1972)

To understand what Salvatore Martirano set out to build, you have to understand the sheer claustrophobia of academic electronic music at the turn of the decade. By 1969, making tape music meant days spent with an X-Acto knife, a splicing block, and endless reels of magnetic tape. Working with the university’s mainframes was even more detached: submit your stack of punched Hollerith cards, wait twelve hours for an overnight batch job, and hope you hadn’t misplaced a single comma that rendered your output silent.

Martirano despised the lag. He possessed the soul of an improviser—steeped in early jazz piano, fluent in midnight jam sessions, and utterly addicted to the friction of live performance. Prerecorded tapes felt dead in his hands; they lacked the panic, the adrenaline, and the kinetic joy of an artist responding to an audience in the room. He didn’t want an electronic slave that obediently played back commands, nor did he want an indifferent adding machine.

He wanted an instrument that could push back.

The breakthrough arrived not from an endowment or a corporate grant, but from an act of high-tech scavenging. Across campus, the Digital Computer Laboratory was decommissioning its massive ILLIAC II supercomputer to clear room for the next technological paradigm. The titan was being gutted, destined for scrap heaps and surplus bins.

Martirano saw gold. Alongside a brilliant, tight-knit cabal of university engineers—chiefly Sergio Franco, an Italian-born doctoral student with an intuitive genius for circuit design, along with computer engineers James Divilbiss and Richard Borovec—Martirano began salvaging thousands of discarded Transistor-Transistor Logic (TTL) integrated circuit chips from the machine’s chassis.

Inside an attic workshop in Stiven House, the floor disappeared beneath tangles of wire, soldering irons, and breadboards. Between 1969 and 1972, this unlikely partnership poured thousands of hours into wiring a monster.

They christened it the Sal-Mar Construction—a hybrid portmanteau of Salvatore and Martirano.

The machine was unlike anything else on Earth. While East Coast and West Coast commercial synthesizers like Moog and Buchla relied on keyboards, rotary dials, or standard sequencer steps to trigger analog oscillators, the Sal-Mar was a hybrid digital-analog beast. At its core lay a sprawling digital logic brain: a network of binary counters, shift registers, and stochastic probability matrices cobbled together from the ILLIAC’s salvaged silicon.

It did not feature a musical keyboard. In its place, Franco and Martirano mounted a control console fitted with 291 touch-sensitive brass pads. Skin contact with the copper pads completed micro-current circuits, allowing Martirano to steer logic gates with his bare fingers without the physical fatigue of clunky mechanical switches.

Crucially, the console was arranged in an inverted hierarchical tree:

• The Top Tier: Governed macro-level probabilistic structures—determining general rhythmic density, tempo drift, and harmonic pools.
• The Middle Tier: Routed digital logic through control channels, directing how algorithms mutated and repeated.
• The Bottom Tier: Addressed individual analog sound generators—forty function-generator oscillators, analog filters, and envelope modulators.

Martirano wasn’t playing individual notes. He was feeding intentions into an autonomous computational nervous system. A tap of his finger didn’t say “play a C-sharp”; it commanded the machine to “favor jagged intervals in an erratic five-beat cycle until further notice.” The TTL logic circuits executed the math instantly, burbling through endless non-repeating variations. If Martirano took his hands off the console, the machine kept thinking, evolving, and generating patterns based on its internal states.

Then came the true stroke of madness: spatial distribution.

Synthesizers of the era were typically mixed down to mono or two-channel stereo. Martirano considered that primitive. He believed that sound’s movement through three-dimensional space was as fundamental a musical parameter as pitch or volume.

The team engineered a proprietary, automated 24-channel analog switching matrix. Output signals were split and steered to up to twenty-four separate power amplifiers and suspended loudspeakers scattered throughout a room—hung from ceiling beams, tucked into corners, and clustered directly behind the audience.

With a few touches on the control matrix, Martirano could throw sound like a physical object:

• A metallic burst of percussive clicks could spin in a dizzying horizontal vortex around the perimeter of the room.
• A low, gravelly square wave could crawl slowly across the floorboards from left to right.
• A cluster of microtonal whistles could ricochet diagonally across the ceiling like shrapnel.

When fully assembled, the Sal-Mar was an eight-foot-long, four-hundred-pound metal behemoth encased in steel frames and finished walnut cabinetry. It drank wall power with terrifying thirst and generated enough internal heat that its creators installed fans that sounded like small jet engines. It was wildly impractical, completely non-standardized, and utterly brilliant.

By 1972, the creature was alive. Martirano packed the 400-pound monolith into heavy, custom-built wooden travel crates, loaded it into the back of a truck, and prepared to introduce the international avant-garde to Urbana’s wildest technological child.

Part IV: The Flying Bus on the Road, the Basement Archive, and the Living Code (1973–Present)

Taking a four-hundred-pound, one-of-a-kind electronic prototype on the road in the mid-1970s was an act of stubborn madness.

The Sal-Mar Construction was never meant for the luggage compartment of a commercial airliner, nor was it built to endure the potholes of midwestern interstates. Yet Martirano, refusing to let his creation gather dust as an academic museum piece, had heavy plywood flight cases built, marshaled student volunteers to haul the iron chassis, and took his cybernetic partner on tour.

Throughout the mid-1970s, the Sal-Mar traveled thousands of miles across North America and Europe. It was unpacked at the Paris Autumn Festival, hauled into contemporary galleries in New York, and set up inside echoing university gymnasiums across the Midwest.

Every tour stop was an athletic and logistical ordeal:

• The Rigging: Suspending twenty-four independent loudspeakers from ceiling rafters, balconies, and ductwork required hours of precarious ladder work and miles of heavy copper speaker wire crisscrossing room floors like spiderwebs.
• The Solder-Joint Triage: Early digital circuitry was fragile. The vibrations of interstate travel routinely cracked cold solder joints or rattled salvaged ILLIAC II chips loose in their sockets. Before every soundcheck, Martirano and his assistants could be found hunched over the opened chassis with soldering irons and voltmeters, hunting down ghost shorts in the dim light of empty recital halls.
• The Performance Crucible: Once fired up, audiences were captivated—and frequently bewildered. Staring at Martirano’s arched back, people witnessed sound behaving as a tangible, physical entity. In an era when most audiences associated synthesizers with the polite Baroque mimicry of Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach or the blues-rock leads of Keith Emerson, Martirano’s chaotic, pointillist space-storms sounded like direct transmissions from deep orbit.

By the late 1970s, the very digital revolution that gave birth to the Sal-Mar began to outpace its physical form. Microprocessors like the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 arrived, shrinking room-sized logic arrays down to chips no larger than a postage stamp. Personal computers emerged, rendering Martirano’s hardwired TTL circuit boards heavy, idiosyncratic relics of an earlier frontier.

Rather than trying to turn the machine into a commercial product, Martirano let it rest. He shifted focus to software, developing the yahaSALmaMac system on early Apple Macintoshes in the 1980s, translating the Sal-Mar’s hierarchical stochastic algorithms into software environments before his death in 1995.

For years, the Sal-Mar Construction sat dormant—an aging titan from the heroic age of experimental music.

Today, the instrument has found a permanent sanctuary right on the campus where it was born. Housed within the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, located in the basement of the Harding Band Building on Sixth Street in Champaign, the Sal-Mar sits preserved as one of the crown jewels of American electro-acoustic history.

Seeing it in person is a disarming experience. Encased in its vintage walnut framing, its hundreds of touch-sensitive copper plates carry the faint, polished patina of Martirano’s fingerprints. It doesn’t look like a standard museum artifact trapped in amber; it looks like a stranded piece of Apollo-era aerospace machinery waiting for someone to feed it 120 volts. Conservators and audio researchers from across the globe still travel to Champaign to document its circuitry, treat its switches, and map its signal paths.

Yet the true legacy of Champaign-Urbana’s experimental crucible isn’t just measured in preserved silicon and steel. It lives in the fundamental architecture of modern digital music:

• Interactive Code & Node Environments: The philosophy behind the Sal-Mar—routing generative logic, probabilistic branching, and dynamic feedback through real-time human gestures—directly anticipated modern visual programming languages like Max/MSP, Pure Data (Pd), and SuperCollider, tools that now power everything from university electronic labs to global arena-pop stage rigs.
• Spatial Audio Ubiquity: The immersive, 24-channel speaker matrix that Martirano and Sergio Franco hand-soldered in an Urbana attic laid the artistic groundwork for what the commercial audio industry now markets as Dolby Atmos, binaural ambisonics, and spatialized 3D gaming audio.
• The Algorithmic Composition Boom: Lejaren Hiller’s wild gambit with the ILLIAC I in 1957—teaching code the harmonic rules of Palestrina to create the Illiac Suite—stands as the unmistakable ancestor of modern generative music, MIDI chord engines, and generative neural-network models.

Champaign-Urbana would go on to earn its worldwide reputation through loud guitar cabinets, basement tape distros, and melodic indie anthems bouncing off the brick walls of Mabel’s and the Blind Pig. But decades before the fuzz pedals were stomped, the twin cities were already rattling the foundations of modern music.

Long before the world knew what a home computer looked like, four musicians in an attic above Mathews Avenue looked at a pile of discarded supercomputer parts and decided to build an instrument that could think for itself—quietly forging the sonic vocabulary of the digital century right in the middle of the flat Illinois plains.

---

Archival Guide: Listening, Reading, and Artifacts

Essential Listening

• Lejaren Hiller & Leonard Isaacson – Illiac Suite for String Quartet (1957) The Landmark: The four historic movements generated on ILLIAC I. Moving from Renaissance species counterpoint into microtonal Markov-chain atonality, it remains the conceptual origin point for algorithmic music. Available on various vintage contemporary compilations and streaming archives (often cataloged under Computer Music Retroprospective or Heliodor/CRI pressings).
• John Cage & Lejaren Hiller – HPSCHD (Nonesuch Records, 1969) The Spectacle: The commercial recording captured a snapshot of the Assembly Hall happening. The original LP jacket famously included a unique computer printout (KNOBS) providing instructions for listeners to continuously adjust the volume and balance dials on their home stereos, turning every living room into an indeterminate performance space.
• Salvatore Martirano – The Sal-Mar Construction (Recorded mid-1970s; released on New World Records / Pogus Productions) The Machine in Action: Recordings documenting Martirano’s live improvisations with the console. Listen for the rapid, pointillist timbre bursts, stochastic density shifts, and raw square-wave logic pulses that Martirano called “driving a flying bus.”
• Salvatore Martirano – L’s GA (1968) The Pre-Sal-Mar Provocation: A radical, politically charged anti-war piece combining gas-masked helium recitation (Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address), multi-channel tape, and film. Staged at UIUC and worldwide, it solidified Martirano’s reputation as an uncompromising avant-garde voice right before building the Sal-Mar.

Primary Reading & Historical Documentation

• Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer (1959) Authors: Lejaren A. Hiller Jr. and Leonard M. IsaacsonSignificance: The seminal McGraw-Hill monograph detailing the mathematical logic, musical philosophy, and technical code behind the ILLIAC I experiments.
• “The Sal-Mar Construction: A Hand-Made Cybernetic Instrument” Documentation: Published papers and retrospective analyses by engineer Sergio Franco and musicologist/archivists documenting the specific TTL logic gate architecture, the 24-channel analog matrix, and the touch-pad hierarchical routing.
• Music at the Edge: The University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios Historical Retrospective: Archival materials and historical retrospective essays detailing the timeline from Stiven House’s attic to the campus music expansion, chronicling directors from Hiller and Herbert Brün to Sever Tipei.

Physical Sites & Archival Collections (Champaign-Urbana)

• The Sal-Mar Construction Console & Audio ArchivesLocation: Sousa Archives and Center for American Music Address: Harding Band Building (Basement), 1103 S. 6th Street, Champaign, ILSignificance: Houses the physical, preserved Sal-Mar Construction unit, along with original hand-drawn circuit schematics by Sergio Franco, Martirano’s performance programs, photos, and reel-to-reel performance documentation.
• James Beauchamp Papers & Prototype Instruments Location: Sousa Archives and University of Illinois ArchivesSignificance: Detailed design notes, patents, and hardware prototypes related to the 1964 Harmonic Tone Generator and early electronic timbre synthesis.
• Stiven House (Mathews Avenue, Urbana) The Original Cradle: The historic Victorian home where Hiller first set up the EMS in the third-floor attic in 1958, bridging the physical gap between engineering and the performing arts quad.