If computer music had parents, Max Mathews would be its father, and IBM (which itself turns 100 today) is most certainly its birth mother. In the late 1950’s Mathews developed MUSIC, the very first digital music synthesis program. With it, he engineered the first ever performance of music using a computer: a 17 second composition played on the IBM 704, which also happened to be the computer that gave birth to FORTRAN and LISP, two of the earliest computer languages.Then in 1962, Mathews would be part of another breakthrough: The first use of computer speech synthesis. Mathews programmed the musical accompaniment for the very first demonstration of computer speech, put together by Bell Laboratories’ John Kelly on the IBM 7094. The song that was played was Harry Dacre’s “Daisy Bell,” and Arthur C. Clarke, who was present at the demonstration, was so impressed that he had it used as the dying digital breaths of the HAL9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.Throughout the earliest years of computers, Mathews and IBM were a veritable dream team, and their legacy resonates strongly in the digital music of today — Mathews’ name is even one half of the visual programming application Max/MSP, a popular tool used to make interactive sound and art.Mathews passed away in April, and the Times wrote a humbling and very fitting obituary[…] the contributions of Max Mathews may seem inevitable. Just as so much of our life has become "digitized," so it seems that sooner or later, sound would become the domain of computers. But the way in which Max opened up this world of possibilities makes him a singular genius, without whom I, and many people over the last six decades, would have led very different lives.Along the way, his fluency in human cognition, acoustics, computer science and electrical engineering allowed him to always keep in mind the big picture: that computers were meant to empower humans to make music, not the other way around.
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