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Interview with Max Mathews C. Roads Interview with Max Mathews Introduction learned to play the violin. Did you study violin as a child? Max Mathews is a pioneer in computer music, hav- Mathews: I studied violin through high school ing developed the first sound synthesis programsin and have continued to play it ever since, taking a the late 1950s at Bell Laboratories.He is the author few lessons but not many. I like the instrument of the classic text on the subject, The Technology very much personally, although I call it an "in- of Computer Music (1969, The MIT Press), and of efficient" music instrument in that you have to numerous papers on the application of computer practice more to achieve a given musical perfor- technology to music and acoustics. mance than with almost any other instrument. This interview took place in Cambridge,Mas- Anyway I'm stuck with the violin; I'm certainly sachusetts in late June 1980. Dr. Mathews had not going to learn any other instruments except the recently returned from a research visit to Institute computer and new instruments I might invent de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique myself! (IRCAM)in Paris, where he and Curtis Abbott had worked with his Sequential Drum and its intercon- nection to the 4C Machine. Music I Background Roads: It must have been in the early and mid-1950s that you started applying computers to- tell us a little about Roads: First, I'd like to ask you a little about your ward musical goals. Can you with the Music I? You background;where you went to school, what you your experiences program on an IBM 704 studied, and how you got interested in computer brought that up computer? music. Mathews: That was the only computer we had Mathews: I studied electrical engineering in all that was capable of doing sound processing. Labs? my schools; Cal Tech first, and then M.I.T. I even- Roads: That was at Bell the 704 was in tually got a Doctor's degree in electrical engineer- Mathews: Actually computer on ing. At that time and ever since I've been interested New York City at IBM WorldHeadquarters to in there and run in large, complex systems and in computers; first in Madison Avenue. We used go back analog computers and then, when they became our programsand bring a digital magnetic tape converter was at practical, in digital computers. Leaving M.I.T., I to Bell Labs. The digital-to-analog went to Bell Labs for my working career. I worked Bell Labs. like? in the Acoustics Research Department applying Roads: What was the converter tube con- digital techniques to speech transmission problems Mathews: We had a 12-bit vacuum It was made and, eventually, to music. I've always enjoyed mu- verter; it was quite a nice machine. by sic as an amateur musician. a company called Epsco, I believe. Roads: I noticed in your demonstration and per- Roads: Music I was capable of playing melodies, formance out at Stanford that you at some point was it not? Mathews: It generated one waveform, an equi- lateral triangularwaveform, with the same rise as characteristics. You could a and Computer Music Journal,Vol. 4, No. 4, Winter 1980, decay specify pitch, 0148-9267/80/ 040015-08 $04.00/0 an amplitude and a duration for each note and that was it. Roads 15 Fig. 1. Max Mathews, June 1980, Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts. (Photo by C. Roads.) memory. Some hardware synthesizers today seem to give you this. Mathews: True. The hardware synthesizers prob- ably have to repeat the trajectory of the software programs. Roads: That must have been 1958. Was this still on the 704 computer? Mathews: By that time we had moved to the IBM 7094 at Bell Labs. That was a very, very effective machine. We used it for almost a decade, not only for musical purposes, but for our great prepon- derance of computations at Bell Labs in speech processing and visual signal processing. That was a fine machine and some of the notable early operat- ing systems were developed for that machine, including Bellsys 1 and Bellsys 2. Roads: Had you heard of anyone else doing any- thing similar at around that time? Music III Mathews: No. There were some people, Lejaren Hiller in particular, who had done a bit with com- Roads: In Music III, which you introduced in posing music-compositional algorithms-but as 1960, you introduced also the concept of the unit far as I know there were no attempts to perform generator, which is certainly one of the major con- music with a computer. In fact, we were the only ceptual advances which has made computer music ones in the world at the time who had the right possible today. Can you describe why that became a kind of digital-to-analog converter hooked up to a necessary concept? digital tape transport that would play a computer Mathews: I too think it's a very important con- tape. So we had a monopoly, if you will, on this cept, and more subtle than it appears on the process. surface. I wanted to give the musician a great deal Roads: This was 1957? of power and generality in making the musical Mathews: Yes. sounds, but at the same time I wanted as simple a Roads: Some people made compositions with programas possible; I wanted the complexity of the Music I, is that not true? programto vary with the complexity of the musi- Mathews: One brave soul, a psychologist named cian's desires. If the musician wanted to do Newman Guttman, made one composition. But it something simple, he or she shouldn't have to do was not hard to realize that we could do better. Mu- very much in order to achieve it. If the musician sic I sounded terrible and was very limited. It was wanted something very elaborate there was the op- clear that if we were going to get better music out tion of working harder to do the elaborate thing. we had to do better. It wasn't hard to see things The only answer I could see was not to make the that could be added and changed. instruments myself-not to impose my taste and ideas about instruments on the musicians-but rather to make a set of fairly universal building Music II blocks and give the musician both the task and the freedom to put these together into his or her instru- Roads: So you developed Music II. As I recall, ments. I made my building blocks correspond to Music II was capable of four independent voices of many of the functions of the new analog sound, and a choice of 16 waveforms stored in synthesizers. 16 Computer Music Journal I wouldn't say that I copied the analog syn- So I had to contemplate rewriting the programonce thesizer building blocks; I think we actually more and I wanted to make a universal program. developed them fairly simultaneously. In any case, Also, I wanted to make it as universally available as that was an advantage because a musician who possible. At that time the Fortrancompiler was knew how to patch together Moog synthesizer available and was the most widely used compiler. I units would have a pretty good idea how to put to- was able to work out what I still believe was a very gether unit generators in the computer. ingenious technique so as to have almost all of the complexity of the programencoded in Fortranstate- ments which are portable, but have the inner loops Music IV of the unit generators, which are computationally rather simple but get executed so many times that Roads: Yes. Music IV followed Music III in 1963. they put a heavy load on the computer, pro- What was the advantage of Music IV over Music III? grammed in machine language. So the overall Mathews: Music IV was simply a response to a programwas both simple in terms of the amount of change in the language and the computer. It had coding required to put it on a new and different ma- some technical advantages from a computer pro- chine, and efficient in terms of running rapidly. gramming standpoint. It made heavy use of a macro Roads: Even though you had developed Music V assembly programwhich existed at the time. as a means of spreading computer music out into Roads: So up until that point you had been pro- the world, a number of musicians had already got gramming in assembly language without a macro wind of what was going on at Bell Labs and were facility? starting to go there to find out more about what Mathews: Macro assemblers were just invented you were up to. Some of your colleagues, including at that time. Indeed, Music IV debugged a lot of the F. R. Moore, Jean-ClaudeRisset, and James Tenney, macro assembler that was used at Bell Labs. It were able to do some very significant work at Bell made very heavy and rather sophisticated use of the Labs around that time. Can you describe the at- macro facilities, and I discovered a lot of bugs in mosphere at Bell Labs?Were composers visiting? them that the designers hadn't anticipated, and that Mathews: When we first made these music pro- they were glad to fix. grams the original users were not composers, they So in essence Music IV was musically no more were the psychologist Guttman and John Pierce powerful than Music III and was only a little more and myself, who are fundamentally scientists.
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