condition (record/cover): NM / NM  Insert included.

One of the most historically significant and least-known documents in this collection. The Vortex concerts, organised by Henry Jacobs and filmmaker Jordan Belson at San Francisco's Morrison Planetarium from 1957, are widely cited as the origin of surround sound as a concept and a practice: forty speakers distributed around the dome of the planetarium, capable of rotating sound through the audience in a continuous sweep. The Vortex system was presented at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels. Highlights Of Vortex, issued by Folkways Records in 1959, captures excerpts from performances designed for a 38-speaker system in a two-channel format that can only approximate what the experience was. The limitation is part of the document. Musique concrète, tape-based composition, and acoustic experiment, assembled by Jacobs, David Talcott, William Loughborough, and Gordon Longfellow at a moment when the vocabulary for what they were doing was still being invented.