My Experiences with Max Mathews in the Early Days of Computer Music
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Hubert Howe Aaron Copland School of Music My Experiences with Max Queens College Flushing, New York 11367 USA Mathews in the Early Days [email protected] of Computer Music I first met Max Mathews in about 1964, when I brief contacts, I gradually came to understand what was still an undergraduate student at Princeton Max had been up to during these early years. University. I had been working for Jim Randall, who In my opinion, computer music would not was composing his piece Mudgett: Monologues of exist if Max Mathews had not been running the a Mass Murderer during the spring for a concert in Behavioral and Acoustical Research departments at the summer. Computer music as we now know it Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New existed then only at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Jersey. Bell Labs had always been the institution and Jim’s way of working on this piece was to that did cutting-edge research on sound, because it compute a section of it at Princeton and drive a was applicable to their main product, the telephone. computer tape up to Bell Labs at Murray Hill, New Much of their research was devoted to such subjects Jersey, where he would convert it to sound, record it as figuring out how poor a transmitted signal could on a reel-to-reel tape, and take it back to Princeton, be while still being intelligible at the other end of where he could listen to it carefully and splice it into the phone line, so that they could save two cents the larger composition, or throw it out and redo that on every phone. (In those days, only rotary landline portion. The limitations of the data-storage system instruments existed.) Bell Labs had long done basic at that time were such that he had a maximum of work on acoustics, extending all the way back to the about two minutes of music that could be converted 1920s. on a single reel. The building always had very tight security In the fall of that year, I became a graduate (making it difficult for Godfrey Winham, who was student, and in collaboration with Godfrey Winham, a British citizen). When you walked from the front we undertook the task of exporting the music of the building to Max Mathews’s office, you went programming language that Max Mathews had through a gallery of their new products, which developed—Music IV—to Princeton. It was at that is where I first saw a videophone. (It required time that I began to realize the comprehensive six telephone lines to transmit the image.) The nature of the vision he had developed for computer Labs always had first-rate equipment and facilities, music, one that has undergirded much of the work including a large anechoic chamber; I once had the that has been going ever since. Godfrey, Jim, and strange experience of being inside it. When Max I still would visit Bell Labs to convert our files came along, he had his staff also working on music. to sound, but it was not too long after that Bell Partly, this was because he was a violinist, and he Labs donated the system they had been using to was interested in the acoustics of the instrument. Princeton, while they implemented a better system. For many years, he admired the work of Carleen That meant that we could do most of our work Hutchins, who made violins and other stringed at Princeton, only going to Bell Labs for our final instruments in the proportions of the violin, but copies. (The converter at Princeton was limited to this was really 17th-century research. a 10-kHz sampling rate, monaural, whereas at Bell The modern computer as we know it was invented Labs they then had 20 kHz, stereo.) We continued to in the 1950s, and by the late years of that decade, it meet Max, although much of our immediate contact was the IBM corporation that controlled almost the was with other people. In later years, I met and got entire market. The only computers that existed were to know Jean-Claude Risset, and I also saw the early mainframe machines, which were huge and required GROOVE system developed by Dick Moore but special climate-controlled rooms and round-the- used mostly by Emmanuel Ghent. Through these clock technicians to keep them going. Only large corporations and universities could afford to buy Computer Music Journal, 33:3, pp. 41–44, Fall 2009 such machines, and they were also very expensive to c 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. run. Fortunately, Princeton University was able to Howe 41 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/comj.2009.33.3.41 by guest on 30 September 2021 support our research, which they did by granting us ultimately went through version 5. The problems what we called “funny money,” which represented with the process at that time were that the data the computer time we used. Totals adding up to capacity and speed of computer tape—the only large hundreds and thousands of dollars were printed on storage medium—were not sufficient to produce the last page of all our jobs. good-quality sound, but that would change later My first machine was the IBM 7090, which took with the advancing technology. I think he probably up an entire large room, probably 700 to 1,000 square envisioned many of the products that later came feet in size. One of the impressive things was the about, such as digital recording and effects devices. console, which was full of blinking lights. Every Max Mathews hired a number of top-notch people time a number was loaded into the accumulator, to work on his music projects. The first composer which was the main register that the machine used, was James Tenney, who wrote an article in the a light corresponding to each bit was lit. Users were Journal of Music Theory in the early 1960s. He not allowed into the computer room, but it had later left computer music but wrote an interesting a large window into which we could look to see book, Meta+Hodos (1964), an application of gestalt whether and when our jobs would be run. The main theory and cognitive science to music. When I first console only took up about as much room as a large went there, a programmer named Joan Miller was desk. Using switches on the console, an operator working on Music IV. She was outstanding, probably could enter machine instructions directly into the only exceeded by Barry Vercoe, who is perhaps best registers, which was necessary sometimes during known for developing Csound. Through her work maintenance operations. What occupied most of I began to realize the power and sophistication of the floor space were 10–15 magnetic tape drives, the programming that went into Music IV. The which were the main storage media. Every time power lay, first of all, in the ability to construct the data was written and had to be re-read, the tape had sound wave. Because all sounds are waves, if you to be rewound. The machine was based on a 6-bit can generate any wave, you can generate any sound. character (which was why it printed only capital The other important point was that, by representing letters), programmed in an octal number system, all of the devices used in constructing the sound and had a 36-bit word, making it slightly more in little computer modules called unit generators accurate that the later 32-bit machines. (Bytes and (an invention by Max Mathews), you could have hexadecimal numbers came later with the System virtually an unlimited amount of equipment; the 360.) Also impressive in size was the printer, which only limitation was in the length of time it took was also about the size of a large desk. The printer to produce the sound, which was often quite long. was the main way users received output, which Learning to describe sounds was not easy, and it consisted of fan-folded sheets of 11 × 17-in. paper. took me years to work it out. Some users impressed others with the large amounts The data speeds and amounts were a serious of print-out they could produce on a given occasion, limitation of early computer music. Our first work most of which was thrown out. could only be realized at 10-kHz mono, which How anyone could have envisioned the potential allowed frequencies only up to 5 kHz. I thought of computers from this manner of interaction still it was heaven when we went to 20-kHz mono or seems mysterious to me, but Max Mathews was a 10-kHz stereo. The only way to record sound was great visionary. He realized the possibilities of the on quarter-inch analog magnetic tape (this was even digital representation of music, and he started using before the cassette!), and the only way to assemble analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters tapes into compositions was by splicing. to allow computers to process sounds. Once he Apart from James Tenney, the musical results of had done that, he realized the potential for music most of the people working at Bell Labs, including synthesis in the concept of generating and processing Max Mathews, were primitive. The work was the waveform digitally from scratch, and he started imaginative and sophisticated in terms of the sound work in the 1950s on a series of music programs that quality, but it was not cutting-edge in a musical 42 Computer Music Journal Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/comj.2009.33.3.41 by guest on 30 September 2021 sense.