Max Mathews, 1926-2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Mathews

RIP

Dai-zeee Dai-zeee giiive meee yooooour aaannnnsweeerrrr dooooooooooooooooo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FKVw41gItE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmKhQYiNZV0

RIP

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a6/Sprad/hesawdhuhkaet.jpg

http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?release=2280578

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSIC-N

MUSIC-N refers to a family of computer music programs and programming languages descended from or influenced by MUSIC, a program written by Max Mathews in 1957 at Bell Labs.[1] MUSIC was the first computer program for generating digital audio waveforms through direct synthesis. It was one of the first programs for making music (in actuality, sound) on a digital computer, and was certainly the first program to gain wide acceptance in the music research community as viable for that task.

MUSIC can be seen as the parent program for:

Max/MSP
Pure Data
AudioMulch
SuperCollider
JSyn
Common Lisp Music
ChucK
Any other computer synthesis language that relies on a modular system (e.g. Reaktor).

http://www.ylem.org/Journal/

2005 Issue 06 & 08 vol. 25
Computers and Music - PDF download - Max Mathews Interview

http://cyberviewer.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/various-music-from-mathematics-1962/

A landmark recording in the history of electronic composition, Music from Mathematics assembles melodies programmed by Bell Labs technicians for the then-new IBM 7090, the company’s first commercial solid-state computer. These eerie, remote songs (many authored by the pioneering visual/acoustical researcher Dr. Max Mathews) are in effect the 7090′s magnetic impressions of mathematical equations imprinted on punch cards. Converted via digital-to-sound transducer into something resembling melodies, the end result is a crazy-quilt of otherworldly beeps, bleeps, and blips that anticipates the sterile soundscapes of IDM by more than a generation. This is music without emotion or humanity — a bold step forward, no doubt, but also a disquieting concept to this day.

Liner Notes: http://www.317x.com/albums/i/IBM/card2.html

Computer Music Currents 13: The Historical CD of Digital Sound Synthesis
http://www.wergo.de/shop/en_UK/Audio_CDs/1000083/1660296/show,93269.html

http://www.discogs.com/Various-Voice-Of-The-Computer-New-Musical-Horizons/release/329176

Max Mathews with the Groove system: http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/artifact/632

http://120years.net/machines/software/index.html

Mathews saw the function of the GROOVE system as being a compositional tool which the composer/conductor manipulates in real time:

"The composer does not play every note in a (traditional) score, instead he influences (hopefully controls) the way in which the instrumentalists play the notes. The computer performer should not attempt to define the entire sound in real time. Instead the computer should retain a score and the performer should influence the way in which the score is played..... the mode of conducting consist of turning knobs and pressing keys rather than waving a stick, but this is a minor detail.......The programme is basically a system for creating storing, retrieving and editing functions of time.

Max Mathews introducing Laurie Spiegel's work with GROOVE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzOJtZYsGSA

Thanks for all these posts Milton. Mathews was a true pioneer and made lots of great art possible.

super mario soundtracks just to name one thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_15ZQL82P4M&feature=grec_index

'that was the first piece ever synthesized on a computer, it was composed in 1958 by a very brave psychologist Newman Guttman, and it sounds absolutely terrible!'

followed up with his / Roder's incredible excerpt from Mozart's Magic Flute for computer synthesized soprano

I really like Newman Guttman's two earliest pieces, especially 'Pitch Variations'. Sounds like Mego 40 years early. The other Bell Labs composers instantly shied away from the resulting tambres, except maybe for one or two of Tenney's noisier pieces.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/arts/music/max-mathews-father-of-computer-music-dies-at-84.html

http://cycling74.com/2011/04/22/max-mathews-an-appreciation/

Geeta Dayal, by chance and luck, got to interview Mathews extensively a couple of weeks before he passed, as she's mentioned on Twitter and elsewhere -- she's currently transcribing what sounds to be a heck of a monster interview, I think she said something like around 10,000 words. Should be a wonderful read.

And here's that interview from Geeta.

I hope she can get the long version up, perhaps more technical detail about Bell Labs development than most people need to know but still great

this comment of Max's:

It turned out that making singing was easier than making speech, because if you make speech you have to figure out what the proper pitch is to go with the inflections of the speech. If you’re making singing, you get the pitch from the melody, and that works.

reminds me of this comment by Robert Ashley:

http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=1194

ROBERT ASHLEY: Well, the problem in discussing hip-hop with somebody who doesn't like hip-hop is that they don't hear the melodies. There's no difference in the quality of the melody in any good hip-hop record now. There are so many I can't even name them. But there's no difference in the quality of the melody between that song and something like Billie Holiday for instance. It's just that the world has changed, the street language has changed and now you have to tune our ears to be able to hear that the very best hip-hop singers are singing exactly in tune. It might be going a little too fast; the melody might be going a little too fast for you to perceive it as melody, but there's no doubt that there's melody...

Stanford CCRMA is doing a celebration / get-together in remembrance of Max on May 29th, mostly friends but open to the public

and she left the bit in where Max discusses the background to the Bell Labs antitrust suits, and how it was a move to digital that democratized the technology and removed the 'natural monopoly' of analog. that might be common knowledge in most histories of that anti-trust suit, but it was news to me

aw, that picture of the two of them at the end. I snapped that on her iPhone. she also took a great picture of Marjorie showing us a portrait hung in their hallway, of James Tenney drawn by Carolee Schneemann, from the late 50's, very real

Very cool!

whoa, i just saw this thread! thanks for linking to the interview i did.

i was wondering if anyone was planning on going to the memorial at stanford this weekend. i can't make it, unfortunately (i'm on the other coast), but it'd be useful for me to know what went on, if someone can report back.

there was a big piece on max in the NYT (on one of their blogs, anyway) this week:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/the-first-computer-musician/?hp

and here's a recent BBC radio piece that discusses max (near the end):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010mwlv

DuBois' opinionator piece is wonderful. The whole article is worth reading, but the connection he makes at the end of this article is worth highlighting:

Nearly a quarter-century old, Max, the software, is currently developed by a software company in San Francisco called Cycling’74, founded by David Zicarelli. Zicarelli met Max, the person, as a graduate student at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), where Max began teaching upon retiring from Bell Labs in 1987: “He had this way of characterizing it, which is that pitch is not expressive, in comparison to rhythm and other aspects of performance. If you store the pitches and let people focus their performance expressivity on rhythm and legato and that kind of thing, you don’t have to worry about staying in tune, or playing the wrong note at the wrong time, and you can actually be really musical. He saw this drum both as an interesting sensor technology, but also as an egalitarian musical vision. That this is a way to open up music performance to a wide audience.” If you’ve ever played Guitar Hero, or Rock Band, you’ve experienced making music through the legacy of Max’s ideas about democratizing musical performance.

I went to the memorial. The big ending with the Radio Baton was the most interesting for me; Max's friends and relatives were accompanying (Beethoven? Mozart? I forget) piece for piano / viola / violin, following the lead of a MIDI instrument soloist on a laptop being driven by a conductor playing the Baton, and a new person from the audience would take the Baton every 32 bars or so. And it was a bit of train wreck; the MIDI soloist kept disassociating from the live musicians. But in the most interesting ways. And in some ways it underlined that even the Baton takes a bit of work to master -- the idea that 'anyone could play it' was perhaps a little ambitious.

There was a nice duet between Laurie Amat singing while being processed by Diane Douglas playing Max's software filter banks. I forget Diane's fiance's name, but he was a nice guy in a leather jacket, had a noise project with some cassettes out, and he said sometimes when Diane & Max would rehearse at their place, the high piercing overtones from Max's filters would make him put his hands over his ears in the next room - 'I've never heard brutal feedback like that anywhere before, let alone coming from a guy in his 80's'

Tangentially Max-related, but I just heard that Lillian Schwartz's early computer animations at Bell Labs are getting officially preserved/restored:

http://www.filmpreservation.org/about/PR-2011-08-10

includes this film (music by Max):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2T43_f_Ebg

A recent Max Mathews tribute, in French:

http://www.franceculture.com/emission-frontieres-max-mathews-2011-09-29.html

I like the Google-translated description: 'In the age of the most unique applications for smartphones, has been somewhat forgotten this modest man, who was the first to cross the border between the analog and the digital world and to invent the first music programs.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hloic1oBfug

no!!! another Bell Labs legend dies:

RIP Dennis Ritchie, co-inventor of the C programming language & key force behind UNIX

http://boingboing.net/2011/10/12/dennis-ritchie-1941-2011-computer-scientist-unix-co-creator-c-co-inventor.html