The Bell Sound 2: Taking it to the Max

At Bell Labs Max Mathews was the granddaddy of all its music makers. If you use a computer to make or record music with, he is your granddaddy too. In 1957 Max wrote a program for a digital computer called Music I. It was a landmark demonstration in the ability to write code to command a machine to synthesize music. Computers can do things and play things that humans alone cannot. Music I opened up a world of new timbral and acoustic possibilities. This was a perfect line of inquiry for the director of Bell Laboratories Behavioral and Acoustic Research Center where Mathews explored a spectrum of ideas and technologies between 1955 and 1987. Fresh out of MIT where he received a Sc.D in electrical engineering Mathews was ready to get to work and Music I was only the beginning of a long creative push in technology and the arts.    
Max’s corner of the sprawling laboratory in Murray Hill, New Jersey carried out research in speech communication, speech synthesis, human learning and memory, programmed instruction, the analysis of subjective opinions, physical acoustics, industrial robotics and music.

Max followed the Music I program with II, III, IV and V, each iteration taking its capabilities further and widening its parameters. These programs carried him through a decade of work and achievement. As noted in the chapter on the Synthesis of Speech, Max had created the musical accompaniment to “Daisy: A Bicycle Built for Two” later made famous by the fictional computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. 
Starting in 1970 he started working with Richard Moore to create the GROOVE system. It was intended to be a “musician-friendly” computer environment. The other programs broke incredible new ground, but the use of them leaned more towards those who could program computers and write code in their esoteric languages, than the average musician or composer of the time. GROOVE was the next step in bringing it to its potential users. It was a hybrid digital-analog system that stood for Generating Realtime Operations On Voltage-controlled Equipment.

Max notes, “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 wroteMusic 10, Music 360, Music 15, Csound and Cmix. Many exciting pieces are now performed digitally. TheIBM 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.”
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But Chowning hadn’t discovered FM Synthesis at the time GROOVE was being created. It was still the 70’s and affordable computers and synthesizers had yet to make it into the homes outside of the most devoted hobbyists. GROOVE was a first step to making computer music in real time. The set up included an analog synth with a computer and monitor. The computer’s memory made it appealing to musicians who could store their manipulations of the interface for later recall. It was a clever workaround the limitations of each technology. The computer was used for its ability to store the musical parameters while the synth was used to create the timbres and texture without relying on digital programming. This set up allowed creators to play with the system, fine tune what they wanted it to do, for later re-creation. 

Bell Labs had acquired a Honeywell DDP224 computer from MIT to use specifically for sound research. This is what GROOVE was built on. The DDP-24 was a 24-bit transistor machine that used magnetic core memory to store data and program instructions. That it had disk storage also meant it was possible for libraries of programming routines to be written. This allowed the users to create customized logic patterns. A composition could be tweaked, adjusted and mixed in real time on the knobs, controls, and keys. In this manner a piece could be reviewed as a whole or in sections and then replayed from the stored data.
When the system was first demonstrated in Stockholm at the 1970 conference on Music and Technology organized by UNESCO, music by Bartok and Bach was played. A few years later Laurie Spiegel would grasp the unique compositional possibilities of the system and take it to the max.

In the meantime Max himself was a guy in demand. IRCAM (Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in France brought him on board as a scientific advisor as they built their own state of the art sound laboratory and studios in France between 1974 and 1980.
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In 1987 Max left his position at Bell Labs to become a Professor of Music (Research) at Stanford University.  There he continued to work on musical software and hardware, with a focus on using the technology in a live setting. “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.”

Max/MSP
Today the MUSIC I software Max wrote through many versions lives on in the software suite of Max / MSP.  Named in honor of Max Mathews, the software is a powerful visual programming language that is now functional for multimedia performance that has grown out of its musical core. The program has been alive, well and growing for more than thirty years and has been used by composers, performers, software designers, researchers, and artists to create recordings, performances, and installations. The software is designed and maintained by the company Cycling ’74.

Building off the gains in musical software developed by Mathews, Miller Smith Puckette (MSP) started to work on a program originally called The Patcher at IRCAM in 1985. This first version for Macintosh had a graphical interface that allowed users to create interactive scores. It wasn’t yet powerful enough to do real time synthesis. Instead it used MIDI and similar protocols to send commands to external sound hardware.

Four years later Max/FTS (Faster Than Sound) was developed at IRCAM. This version could be ported to the IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation (ISPW) for the NeXT computer system. This time around it could do real time synthesis using an internal hardware digital signal processor (DSP) making it a forerunner to the MSP extensions that would later be added to Max. 1989 was also the year the software was licensed to Opcode who promptly launched a commercial version at the beginning of the next decade.

Opcode held onto the program until 1997. During those years a talented console jockey named David Zicarelli further extended and developed the promise of Max. Yet Opcode wanted to cancel their run with the software. Zicarelli new it had even further potential. So he acquired the rights and started his own company called Cycling ’74. Zicarelli’s timing proved to be fortuitous as Gibson Guitar ended up buying Opcode, and then after they owned it for a year, ceasing its existence. Such is the fabulous world of silicon corporate buy outs.

Miller Smith Puckette had in the meantime released the independent and open-source composition tool Pure Data (Pd). It was a fully redesigned tool that still fell within the same tradition as his earlier program for IRCAM. Zicarelli, sensing that a fruitful fusion could be made manifest, released Max/MSP in 1997, the MSP portion being derived from Puckette’s work on PureData. The two have been inseparable ever since.
The achievement meant that Max was now capable of real time manipulation of digital audio signals sans dedicated DSP hardware. The reworked version of the program was also something that could work on a home computer or laptop. Now composers could use this powerful tool to work in their home studios. The musical composition software that had begun on extensive and expensive mainframes was now available to those who were willing to pay the entry fee. You didn’t need the cultural connections it took to work at places like Bell Labs or IRCAM. And if you had a computer but couldn’t afford the commercial Max/MSP you could still download Pd for free. The same is true today. 

 Extension packs were now being written by other companies, contributing to the ecology around Max. In 1999 the Netochka Nezvanova collective released a suite of externals that added extensive real-time video control to Max. This made the program a great resource for multimedia artists. Various other groups and companies continued to tinker and add things on.

It got to the point where Max Mathews himself, well into his golden years, was learning how to use the program named after him. Mathews has received many accolades and appointments for his work. He was a member of the IEEE, the Audio Engineering Society, the Acoustical Society of America, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He held a Silver Medal in Musical Acoustics from the Acoustical Society of America, and the Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et Lettres, République Française.

Mathews died of old age at 84 due to complications from pneumonia on April 21, 2011 in San Francisco. He was 84. He was survived by his wife, Marjorie, his three sons and six grandchildren.
 
Refernces:
Max Mathews. “Horizons in Computer Music,” March 8-9, 1997, Indiana University
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDP-24
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(software)

Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series.