Max V. Mathews — MUSIC V — the canonical computer-music language

1969

Artists: Max V. Mathews · Year: 1969 · Medium: Computer-music programming language — the fifth iteration of Mathews's software · Substrate: Bell Labs mainframes; output to audio via digital-to-analog conversion; instrument definitions in code · Place: Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA · Institution: Bell Telephone Laboratories Max Mathews was the Bell Labs engineer who, in 1957, wrote MUSIC I — the first software to generate musical sound samples on a digital computer. Across the following decade he iterated through MUSIC II, III, IV, and finally MUSIC V (1969), each version extending the language's musical expressiveness while keeping the fundamental insight intact: that a computer could synthesize any sound at all, given a sufficient description of the sound's waveform, and that music could therefore be written in a programming language without the constraint of existing instruments. MUSIC V is the canonical version because it was widely distributed outside Bell Labs — Mathews released the source code, which Barry Vercoe later used as the basis for Csound (1985), still one of the field's major teaching environments. Every subsequent software-synthesis language — Max/MSP, SuperCollider, Pure Data, Kyma — descends from MUSIC V's instrument-score architecture. Every time a contemporary musician defines an oscillator in code, they are working in a tradition Mathews invented. Mathews's influence on computer music is difficult to overstate. He was the field's founding figure, the author of its foundational textbook (The Technology of Computer Music, 1969), and the technical collaborator on nearly every major Bell Labs music-art project of the 1960s and 1970s. He died in 2011 at eighty-four. MUSIC V sits alongside BEFLIX as Bell Labs' two founding infrastructure contributions to the computer-arts field. Lore Mathews had trained as an acoustical engineer before joining Bell Labs; his interest in computer music was initially a side project that grew over years into the institution's major research focus. The first MUSIC I performance in 1957 produced a seventeen-second computer-synthesized piece; the computer took over an hour to render it. Mathews was a working violinist throughout his career and performed on his own electronic instruments at IRCAM, Stanford CCRMA, and other venues. He consulted for IRCAM at its founding in Paris (1977). Sources • Mathews, Max V. — The Technology of Computer Music (MIT Press, 1969) • Bell Labs Technical Memoranda • Stanford CCRMA — Mathews oral history