Dinosaur Music presents five works by three composers of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford: Chris Chafe, David Jaffe and William Schottstaedt. All were created between 1982 and 1986 with the Samson Box and its associated software. The disc was produced for CCRMA by Jaffe.

The Samson Box, formally the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer, was designed by Peter Samson and delivered to CCRMA in October 1977. It was a real-time digital synthesis machine, and for more than a decade it was the centre's principal means of producing music. Jaffe, an American composer, performer and software developer, later taught at Princeton, Stanford and Melbourne and developed the NeXT Music Kit; his technical work includes the physical modelling of plucked strings. Michael McNabb assisted with the digital engineering and Bill Giolando with the SMPTE editing; the cover is based on a dinosaur drawing by Ezra Buchla.

Chafe's In a Word (1982), for cello and computer, opens the programme, with the composer himself as cellist. It was his doctoral project in the music department at Stanford, and the score combines a cello part with a reduction of the computer part. Jaffe's Silicon Valley Breakdown (1982), almost twenty minutes long, is the longest work on the disc. It is written for synthesized plucked strings, and its title names the region around Stanford. Schottstaedt contributes three works: Water Music I and Water Music II, and the closing Dinosaur Music, which gives the record its name.

Silicon Valley Breakdown first drew international attention when it was presented at the Venice Biennale in 1982, and according to Jaffe it has since been performed in more than twenty-five countries. The machine behind all five pieces answered a practical problem. Software synthesis in the Music V tradition ran on general-purpose computers, and composers often spent hundreds of seconds of computing time for each second of sound. The Samson Box moved this work into dedicated hardware. The disc belongs to Digital Music Digital, the CD series that Johannes Goebel initiated with Wergo in 1986, among the first to use the new medium for digital music.

CD, Wergo WER 2016-50, released in 1988; Discogs notes that an earlier version without barcode exists. Total time 53 minutes 44 seconds.