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The creation of IRCAM was an act of political revenge: France aimed to reclaim its status as an art capital, which had shifted to the USA (Bell Labs, Stanford) after the war. Boulez built a 'state within a state'—windowless, underground, with a budget to hire the world's best scientists. In this isolation, Miller Puckette, trying to simplify workflows with complex hardware, wrote the prototype for Max/MSP—software now found on the laptop of almost every electronic musician.

But the era's true symbol was the hardware '4X' processor. Its computational power was so excessive for music that its architecture was licensed by the military. While composers in the Espace de Projection (a hall with variable acoustics) searched for new harmonies, fighter pilots used the exact same code to practice dogfighting in simulators.