RIP Max Mathews, "father of computer music"

[dubbmann]

from Stanford News Service:

Max Mathews, who has been called the "father of computer music," died of pneumonia in San Francisco on April 21. He was 84.

Mathews was a Stanford professor emeritus of music at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), where he remained brilliantly inventive and innovative into his last days.

"He imagined and created his own magical world and first built the essential concepts and tools that allowed us all to do the same," said John Chowning, the founding director of CCRMA.

...In 1957, Mathews wrote the first version of "Music," a program that allowed an IBM 704 mainframe computer to play a 17-second composition.

He quickly realized, as he put it in a 1963 article in Science, "There are no theoretical limits to the performance of the computer as a source of musical sounds."

He joined the acoustics and behavioral research department of Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1955. (There), he and other researchers figured out how to digitize speech and, using a computer, turn the bits back into sound waves.

Mathews thought of adapting this process to music and wrote a program making the technology available to nonscientists.

Arthur C. Clarke visited Bell Labs and listened as a voice recorder synthesizer performed a rendition of "Daisy Bell" -- the feat was immortalized in "2001: A Space Odyssey," when the computer HAL 9000 sings the song as it is dismantled.

He collaborated with avant-garde composers Edgard Varese and John Cage. With composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, he helped found Paris' Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in the 1970s and served as a scientific advisor.

Mathews invented several electronic violins and a totally new instrument that he called the "daton," a mix between a drum and a conductor's baton.

He said that "the real-time immediacy in performance and inexpensiveness of the equipment far exceeds my wildest dreams."

More here.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/bottomline/detail?entry_id=88061#ixzz1KzP2NrzF

[bequick_x]

Wow, thanks for sharing!

[FreQnic]

A true creative without a shadow of a doubt.

Thank you for your inspired contributions Max and may you rest in eternal peace.

[zenguitar]

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.

such ethereal recordings.

Andy

[Zukan]

R.I.P

[Martin Walker]

Indeed. Another myth disappears into the mists of history

Martin