Max Mathews, the man who literally first gave voice to computer music, died yesterday at age 84. I can only offer my heartfelt condolences to Max’s friends and family.

Max was the man present at the moment when the very subject matter of this site was born. An IBM 704 playing his 17-second composition marked the first genuinely digital synthesis of music on a computer.

Max’s achievements, though, go beyond that initial breakthrough:

Digital synthesis of music.
The Music 1 software demo on an IBM 704 in New York City was the first computer music performance. While not real-time, and while Mathews himself says “the timbres and notes were not inspiring,” it was a stunning proof of concept.

The computer sings.
Mathews’ arrangement of “Daisy Bell,” for a computer-synthesized voice developed by a Bell Labs team led by John Kelly, was the first “singing” digital computer. The event found its way into pop culture via Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Computer music in code.
Computer tech is supposedly fleeting, but Mathews’ original work on the Music I – Music V series was the direct basis for languages like Csound and Cmix, used today. (Csound apparently even found its way onto a popular karaoke machine.) The basic notions of scores and instruments, the fundamental assumptions of the language, and the essential designed features all remain visible in today’s languages. Mathews indirectly influenced every other music language since. He is the namesake of Miller Puckette’s “Max,” a reference to the timing techniques used in what is now Max/MSP, which were modeled on techniques designed by Mathews. That means that there’s something of Max’s thinking in Max/MSP, Jitter, Pd, GEM, Max for Live, and others.

Innovation in gestural control.
Before the Wii remote and Microsoft Kinect would come to change popular ideas about gestural control of computers, Mathews’ Radio Baton explored similar spatial manipulation in musical performance. Add to that involvement with research and events like the “New interfaces for musical expression” conference, and Max has had a profound impact on the exploration of novel control.

Max was warm, witty, and insightful in every encounter I had with him, going on to continue to inspire colleagues and students through his late years. He played a role not only in our narrowly-appreciated realm of computer music, but the history of the computer itself.

There’s really too much to say; let us know if you have comments for CDM or contact us directly and I hope to put together something more detailed by next week.

The miracle of human hearing goes well beyond audiophile snobbery over “high fidelity,” or the machinations of sometimes-arbitrary, designed-by-committee industry specifications. But, in the context of my rant about perceived myths in audio, what can we hear, really?

And how much perceptible sound can you squeeze into an MP3?

For his master’s thesis at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Kyle McDonald investigated the deeper, existential issues behind common digital audio specifications. The question: what if you could play every single distinguishable sound that the MP3 specification can accommodate? (For the technically minded, that means iterating through every possible MP3 frame.)

The resulting sonic composition holds a mirror to the way the specification describes our own psychoacoustic capabilities. Just don’t expect to be able to process the answer if you’re in a hurry. Kyle’s “answer” to this ultimate question of noise, encoding, and everything takes some 10^450 years to complete. (That’s a lot of zeros, if you’re keeping score at home.)

Kyle explains:

The composition iterates through all the possible sounds MP3 can handle, and assuming that corresponds to our psychoacoustic limitations, all the sounds we can handle. I have some hour-long excerpts up, which should be easier to skip through than the live stream from last month

I wrote a short thesis exploring these ideas, too:

http://oelf.googlecode.com/files/mcdonald-thesis.pdf [link fixed]
Dealing with questions like “what is noise” and “how are biases embedded and revealed”.

I’m not as interested in copyright issues as I am in asking MP3: “what do you sound like, really?”, exploring the intersection of glitch art and enumerative pieces (Every Icon/Wishing Well) + “empty” conceptual art (4’33″, Duchamp’s “Fountain”).

The results aren’t going to settle any debates, but they might at least silence a debate. The results, to me, are strangely beautiful. The sonification vibrates and chirps like a small collection of half-cyborg insects, humming away a summer evening on an alien world. You could meditate to it. (If CDM ever starts a digital audio healing center, we’ll be set.)

The visualizations, at top, are just as aesthetically beautiful, and begin to provide actual information about the quantity and patterns of data that emerge.

A question like “does this MP3 sound good?” or “is this recording any good?” seems simple enough. Kyle’s thesis doesn’t answer any questions, so much as reframe those questions in a beautiful way. But that’s not to say this is all meaningless. The scale of real-world frequencies your ear and brain can perceive is immense and measurable. It’s enormous to conceive, but it’s a real thing. The potential data storage of our technology is vast, too, but it’s still no match for your mind. And if that doesn’t give you an excuse to invest in some ear protection before the next concert, or just give yourself part of this afternoon off, listen to an album, and let your brain relax a bit, I don’t know what will. If you’re still not convinced, breathe deeply and listen to some of Kyle’s sound excerpts for half an hour and get back to me.

http://kylemcdonald.net/oelf

As several of you noticed, the BBC has discovered 1951 recordings of computer-synthesized music, predating the previous earliest recordings from New Jersey’s Bell Labs in 1957.

‘Oldest’ computer music unveiled [BBC News]

So, who gets the credit for the first digital synthesis? This particular recording doesn’t change much, in that Bell was never recognized as the first computer-created music – they just happened to have the earliest recordings still available.

Here’s the timeline:

Australia: CSIRAC

Australia’s CSIRAC computer is generally recognized as the first computer to play a musical melody. Bonus points: the CSIR Mk1 played music in August 1951, before just about anything else, and it did perform in real-time. But it doesn’t count as the first digital synth, because it just sent raw pulses of data directly to the speaker. (Digital-to-analog converters didn’t actually exist in practice at that point.) And since no one seems to have recordings of the CSIR Mk1 from August, the UK Ferranti Mark 1 recording for BBC wins in the documentation category.

That said, the CSIR Mk1 definitely wins cool points for its unusual sound production methods, and it even got a program for easier, more musical entry of melodies later (1957, via Thomas Cherry.)

More details here:

The Music played by CSIRAC [Melbourne School of Engineering]

CDM loves Australia, so perhaps we can simply say that Australia gets the credit for the first computer-programmed musical materials, just not digital synthesis as they lacked a DAC.

UK: Ferranti Mark 1

The BBC recorded the recording above several weeks too late to beat Australia, but the computer in question is the heir to a very important machine. Baby (Small Scale Experimental Machine) is credited as the first “universal” computer – that is, it had the marked advantage of functioning with a range of custom software rather than needing to be rewired each time you wanted to change tasks. Baby predated Australia’s CSIRAC by about a year. The recording here is of the Ferranti Mark 1, which is a production-ready descendent of the Baby.

The recording itself is very interesting, because like the CSIR Mk1, the software used allowed for basic custom programming of melodies. Likewise, while the primitive music was little more than a novelty, it did illustrate to the public that computers would have broader applications than most had initially imagined.

Like CSIR Mk1, though, this isn’t really “computer music” as we now understand it – though it did involve basic sequencing.

US: IBM 704 and MUSIC

The legacy of Max Mathews and Bell Labs remain safe, though, despite these early discoveries. The key is the content: early computers could make noise, but Mathews’ team at Bell could (ahem) create digital music. It was one small step for sound, one giant leap for software. Whereas the CSIR Mk1 and Ferranti machines involved primitive tools for sequencing melodies, the Music I software allowed for control over synthesis, relatively sophisticated and musical descriptions for scores, and an architecture that’s (incredibly) still widely-used in music applications today. (A direct descendent is even included in the XO Laptop project’s Sugar software suite, though nearly any modular computer synth would recognize Music-N as its grandfather.)

The key moment is 1957’s recording of a 17-second composition by Mathews on an IBM 704. (That also means that Music N and Mathews handily win the first original computer music prize.) Max tells some great stories about that train ride over to Manhattan from New Jersey to feed the 704 music. The 704 wasn’t yet speedy enough to handle real-time sound generation, either – let alone counting the train commute time.

Bell did it again in 1961 with a computer-synthesized singer, as heard here during 2007’s Maxfest – arrangement by Max, voice synthesis technology from a team led by John Kelly:

To me, though, these achievements are related. There’s the initial proof of concept, even one as simple as sending data words to a speaker and arranging a melody – then the all-important architectural breakthrough, one that can actually act as a real foundation for the future. And as much as people talk about rapid technological change, conceptual achievement really led the way. Harry Nyquist imagined the basics of digital signal recording as early as 1928, later proven by Bell and MIT’s digital maestro Claude Shannon. (Indiana University has a great big-picture overview of these developments.)

And while these particular examples from Australia and Manchester aren’t entirely musical, I think it’s equally fascinating that the chiptune, circuit bending, and DIY electronics scenes are all returning to the fundamentals of digital synthesis. To these younger musicians, it seems to be a way to get more intimate with the organic qualities of the technology.

Thanks to all of you who sent this in!

The basic technology of the phonautograph: make an image of the sound using a hog bristle, not unlike the way CDs work with lasers for optical storage (albeit with digital, not analog information), or the image produced in an optical sound track in film. (If you feel bad for the hog, wait until you get to the end of this story.)

More on the phonautograph, including details from the folks who brought us FireWire (IEEE 1394):

IEEE Virtual Museum: The Phonautograph

Wikipedia: Phonograph (and, specifically, its roots in the phonautograph)

Leon Scott, the inventor

Here’s the strange part of the story: Alexander Bell had his own twist on the phonautograph, via the IEEE Virtual Museum:

…one of Bell’s associates supplied him with the ear and part of the skull of a dead man. Bell attempted to attach a recording stylus to the ear and use it to inscribe a line on a smoked-glass plate. … It worked, and when Bell shouted into the dead man’s ear, the stylus recorded his speech on the glass.

Yes, that’s one way to get your transducer: steal it from a dead person. I had no idea Dr. Bell had a Dr. Frankenstein side.

I’m sure there’s a digital, interactive installation piece just waiting to be inspired by this. Please refrain from using an actual dead person, okay? That’s creepy. Now there’s an iPod alternative…

Au Clair de la Lune [MP3]

The Edison recording worked more like phonograph recordings to follow; it was recorded on tin foil. But this recording was essentially optical — a phonautogram that recorded sound visually. There’s a terrific article at the New York Times:

Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison (via … my Dad! Thanks, Dad!)

Anyone familiar with phonautogram technology, I’d love to hear from you. Historians in our midst, perhaps?

More historical oddities: How Francis Bacon predicted the recording studio in ‘New Atlantis’ in 1626 on Music thing

Updated: The original inventor didn’t get to hear his recording — it debuted in 2008. (And you think your record label takes a long time to release things.) The reason? The device could record, but couldn’t play back.

More on the technology involved, including a bizarre alternative using a dead person’s ear.