Max Mathews
Max Vernon Mathews, a pioneer in the world of
computer music, was born in Columbus, Nebraska, on November 13, 1926. He studied electrical engineering at the
California Institute of Technology and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a
Sc.D. in 1954. Working at
Bell Labs, Mathews wrote
MUSIC, the first widely-used program for sound generation, in 1957. For the rest of the century, he continued as a leader in digital
audio research,
synthesis, and human-computer
interaction as it pertains to music
performance.
Although he was not the first to generate sound with a computer (an Australian
CSIRAC computer played tunes as early as 1951),
[Australian CSIRAC computer website] Mathews fathered generations of digital music tools. He describes his work in parental terms in this excerpt from "Horizons in Computer Music," March 8-9, 1997,
Indiana University:
"Computer performance of music was born in 1957 when an
IBM 704 in
NYC played a 17 second composition on the Music I program which I wrote. The timbres and notes were not inspiring, but the technical breakthrough is still reverberating. Music I led me to Music II through V. A host of others wrote Music 10, Music 360, Music 15, CSound, Cmix. Many exciting pieces are now performed digitally. The IBM 704 and its siblings were strictly studio machines--they were far too slow to synthesize music in real-time. Chowning's
FM algorithms and the advent of fast, inexpensive, digital chips made real-time possible, and equally important, made it affordable.
"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 well-known song
Daisy Bell ("Daisy, daisy") for an uncanny performance by computer-synthesized human voice, using technology developed by
John Kelly of Bell Laboratories and others.
Arthur C. Clarke of
2001: A Space Odyssey fame 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 used it in the climactic scene of his novel and screenplay for
2001: A Space Odyssey,
[Arthur C. Clarke online Biography] where the
HAL 9000 computer sings the same song as he is being put to sleep by astronaut
Dave Bowman.
[Bell Labs: Where "HAL" First Spoke (Bell Labs Speech Synthesis website)]Mathews directed the Acoustical and Behavioral Research Center at
Bell Laboratories from 1962 to 1985, which carried out research in speech communication, visual communication, human memory and learning, programmed instruction, analysis of subjective opinions, physical acoustics, and industrial robotics. From 1974 to 1980 he was the Scientific Advisor to the Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (
IRCAM), Paris, France, and since 1987 has been Professor of Music (Research) at
Stanford University. He served as the Master of Ceremonies for the concert program of NIME-01, the inaugral conference on
New interfaces for musical expression.
Mathews is a member of the
National Academy of Sciences, the
National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow in the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
Acoustical Society of America, the
IEEE, and the
Audio Engineering Society. He holds a Silver Medal in Musical Acoustics from the Acoustical Society of America, and the Chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et Lettres, Republique Francaise.
The software package is named after him.
Cited References
