Max Mathews

Max Vernon Mathews (born November 13, 1926 in Columbus, Nebraska, USA – April 21, 2011 in San Francisco, CA, USA) was a pioneer of computer music.

Mathews 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. In 1968, Mathews and L. Rosler developed Graphic 1, an interactive graphical sound system on which one could draw figures using a light-pen that would be converted into sound, simplifying the process of composing computer generated music. Also in 1970, Mathews and F. R. Moore developed the GROOVE (Generated Real-time Output Operations on Voltage-controlled Equipment) system, a first fully developed music synthesis system for interactive composition and realtime performance, using 3C/Honeywell DDP-24 (or DDP-224) minicomputers. It used a CRT display to simplify the management of music synthesis in realtime, 12bit D/A for realtime sound playback, an interface for analog devices, and even several controllers including a musical keyboard, knobs, and rotating joysticks to capture realtime performance.

Although MUSIC was not the first attempt to generate sound with a computer (an Australian CSIRAC computer played tunes as early as 1951), Mathews fathered generations of digital music tools. He described his work in parental terms, in the following excerpt from "Horizons in Computer Music", March 8–9, 1997, Indiana University:

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