Max Vernon Mathews (* November 13, 1926, in Columbus, Nebraska) is a pioneer in the world of computer music. He studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a Sc.D. in 1954. Working at Bell Labs, Mathews wrote MUSIC, the first widely-used program for sound generation, in 1957.

For the rest of the century, he continued as a leader in digital audio research, synthesis, and human-computer interaction as it pertains to music performance. Although he was not the first to generate sound with a computer (an Australian CSIRAC computer played tunes as early as 1951), Mathews fathered generations of digital music tools. He describes his work in parental terms in this excerpt from "Horizons in Computer Music," March 8-9, 1997, Indiana University: "Computer performance of music was born in 1957 when an IBM 704 in NYC played a 17 second composition on the Music I program which I wrote.

The timbres and notes were not inspiring, but the technical breakthrough is still reverberating. Music I led me to Music II through V. A host of others wrote Music 10, Music 360, Music 15, Csound and Cmix.

Many exciting pieces are now performed digitally. The IBM 704 and its siblings were strictly studio machines--they were far too slow to synthesize music in real-time. Chowning's FM algorithms and the advent of fast, inexpensive, digital chips made real-time possible, and equally important, made it affordable." "Starting with the Groove program in 1970, my interests have focused on live performance and what a computer can do to aid a performer.

I made a controller, the radio-baton, plus a program, the conductor program, to provide new ways for interpreting and performing traditional scores. In addition to contemporary composers, these proved attractive to soloists as a way of playing orchestral accompaniments. Singers often prefer to play their own accompaniments.

Recently I have added improvisational options which make it easy to write compositional algorithms. These can involve precomposed sequences, random functions, and live performance gestures. The algorithms are written in the C language.

We have taught a course in this area to Stanford undergraduates for two years. To our happy surprise, the students liked learning and using C. Primarily I believe it gives them a feeling of complete power to command the computer to do anything it is capable of doing."

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