An Interview with Barry Vercoe

Abstract

Barry L. Vercoe (see Figure 1) is one of the foremost developers and disseminators of computer music technology. He is best known as the inventor of the Music 360 (Vercoe 1973), Music 11 (Vercoe 1978), Csound (Vercoe 1985), and RTCsound (Vercoe and Ellis 1990) languages for digital sound synthesis, which have been used by thousands of composers around the world. He is also a respected composer and a broad thinker who was one of the founding faculty members of MIT's Media Laboratory. Mr. Vercoe was born in New Zealand in 1937. He received bachelors' degrees in music and mathematics from the University of Auckland, followed by the MusD degree from the University of Michigan, where he studied under Ross Lee Finney. After brief appointments at Princeton, Oberlin, and Yale, he settled at MIT in 1971, where he was granted tenure in 1974 and became a full professor. In 1973 Mr. Vercoe founded the MIT Experimental Music Studio (EMS), the first facility in the world to dedicate digital computers exclusively to research and composition in computer music. The EMS was one of the innovating studios of its time, and it oversaw the development or improvement of technologies such as real-time digital synthesis, live keyboard input, graphical score editing, graphical patching languages, synchronization between natural and synthetic sound in composition, and advanced music languages. In 1976, the EMS hosted an international conference on computer music; in 1981, Mr. Vercoe encouraged the MIT Press to take over publication of Computer Music Journal beginning with Volume 4. In 1985, the EMS was integrated into the new MIT Media Laboratory to carry on its work in a new, cross-disciplinary context of multimedia research. At the Media Lab, Barry Vercoe has directed research groups on music and cognition, synthetic listeners and performers, and machine listening. His publications span many fields of research, including music theory (Vercoe 1968), signal processing (Vercoe 1982), music perception (Vercoe 1997), and audio coding (Vercoe, Gardner, and Scheirer 1998). Among other awards, Mr. Vercoe received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982-1983 for his innovative work exploring synthetic performers (Vercoe 1984; Vercoe and Puckette 1985) and other forms of automatic accompaniment systems. In 1992, he received the Computer World/ Smithsonian Award in Arts and Media. The study of interaction between human and computer performers remains his closest research interest. This interview was conducted in February 1999 as part of the Media Lab's Digital Rewind celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Experimental Music Studio.