My Experiences with Max Mathews in the Early Days of Computer Music

Abstract

��� I first met Max Mathews in about 1964, when I was still an undergraduate student at Princeton University. I had been working for Jim Randall, who was composing his piece Mudgett: Monologues of a Mass Murderer during the spring for a concert in the summer. Computer music as we now know it existed then only at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and Jim’s way of working on this piece was to compute a section of it at Princeton and drive a computer tape up to Bell Labs at Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he would convert it to sound, record it on a reel-to-reel tape, and take it back to Princeton, where he could listen to it carefully and splice it into the larger composition, or throw it out and redo that portion. The limitations of the data-storage system at that time were such that he had a maximum of about two minutes of music that could be converted on a single reel. In the fall of that year, I became a graduate student, and in collaboration with Godfrey Winham, we undertook the task of exporting the music programming language that Max Mathews had developed—Music IV—to Princeton. It was at that time that I began to realize the comprehensive nature of the vision he had developed for computer music, one that has undergirded much of the work that has been going ever since. Godfrey, Jim, and I still would visit Bell Labs to convert our files to sound, but it was not too long after that Bell Labs donated the system they had been using to Princeton, while they implemented a better system. That meant that we could do most of our work at Princeton, only going to Bell Labs for our final copies. (The converter at Princeton was limited to a 10-kHz sampling rate, monaural, whereas at Bell Labs they then had 20 kHz, stereo.) We continued to meet Max, although much of our immediate contact was with other people. In later years, I met and got to know Jean-Claude Risset, and I also saw the early GROOVE system developed by Dick Moore but used mostly by Emmanuel Ghent. Through these