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Max Mathews

Max Matthews was working as an engineer at the famed Bell Laboratory in 1954 when he was asked to determine if the computer Bell was designing could create music. The landmark Music 2 and later Music 4 projects put the two concepts together as early as 1957 the computer and music had a future and Max was there for the birth.

Max had moved on to musical programming when Don Buchla and Robert Moog created similar electronic music in the form of the synthesizer. As a Stanford University professor, Max worked with his close friend John Chowning for several decades on a number of programs including the technology used for Yamaha’s DX7.

MUSIC 1, which was quickly replaced by MUSIC II running on an IBM 704 and written in assembler code was the first real computer synthesis programme, developed by Max Mathews of Bell Laboratories in 1957.

MUSIC III was written in 1959 for the new generation of IBM transistorised 7094 machines which were much faster and easier to use than the older models. The MUSIC series software went through a stage of elvolution folowing the deleopment of the IBM computer whhich ended in 1968 with MUSIC V written in FORTRAN and running on the IBM 360 machines.

MUSIC V was picked up and developed by various other programmers such as Barry vercoe at MIT who designed MUSIC 360 and MUSIC 10 by John Chowning and James Moorer at Stanford University.

Starting with the Groove program in 1970, my interests have focused on live performance and what a computer can do to aid a performer. I made a controller, the radio-baton, plus a program, the conductor program, to provide new ways for interpreting and performing traditional scores. In addition to contemporary composers, these proved attractive to soloists as a way of playing orchestral accompaniments. Singers often prefer to play their own accompaniments. Recently I have added improvisational options which make it easy to write compositional algorithms. These can involve precomposed sequences, random functions, and live performance gestures. The algorithms are written in the C language. We have taught a course in this area to Stanford undergraduates for two years. To our happy surprise, the students liked learning and using C. Primarily I believe it gives them a feeling of complete power to command the computer to do anything it is capable of doing."

In 1961, Mathews arranged the accompaniment of the song "Daisy Bell" for an uncanny performance by computer-synthesized human voice, using technology developed by John Kelly of Bell Laboratories and others. Author Arthur C. Clarke was coincidentally visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility at the time of this remarkable speech synthesis demonstration and was so impressed that he later told Stanley Kubrick to use it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the climactic scene where the HAL 9000 computer sings while his cognitive functions are disabled.

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composer / conductor

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