Robyn Baker

Dr. Hemmel

TH-259-B1

30 October 2017

Max Mathews Research Paper

Max Vernon Mathews was born in Columbus, Nebraska on November 13th,

1926. He passed away in San Francisco, California on April 21st, 2011. Mathews

passed away leaving a great legacy in the world of electroacoustic music. Before his

death, Mathews received many honours, including the SEAMUS Award from the Society

for Electro-Acoustic Music in 1989, the French Legion of Honour in 1994, and in 1987,

Dr. Mathews was appointed as a professor at Stanford Universitys Center for Computer

Research in Music and Acoustics (Mattis 1).

Max grew up in the middle country region of Nebraska. His parents were both

teachers. His father taught chemistry, biology, and physics and was the principal of the

high school. Maxs father allowed him to build and experiment in the labs, which

sparked Mathews love for science and experimentation. Mathews was also very

interested in mathematics. In high school, his teacher would give him additional books

to read by himself. During this time, Max also studied the violin, but never achieved

high proficiency. He thought it was inefficient because of the amount of practice put in

was so much higher than the skill built (Park 9).

Mathews never completed high school. Around 1944, he just stopped going to

school. Following this, Mathews moved to Seattle and enlisted in the Navy to become a

radar repairman (Park 9). Following his time in the Navy, Mathews studied electrical
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engineering in college at the California Institute of Technology, and later at M.I.T to get

his doctorate in electrical engineering. His strong passion and desire to do electronic

music stemmed from an initial fascination with complex computer systems and

programming (Mattis 1).

After leaving M.I.T., Mathews had planned on working at the 3M Company, but

he was refused employment because of a back injury (Park 9-10). Instead, he went on

to work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in a research program started to investigate

the use of digital signals as the medium of transmission (Manning 3). There, he worked

in the Acoustic Research Department, dealing with speech transmission error, which led

to working with music (Roads 15).

John Pierce, Mathews boss, invited him to a multitude of concerts and events.

One concert, that of a local pianist performing Arnold Schoenberg, inspired Mathews to

develop a computer music language. Pierce suggested that a computer could do better

and that they had the equipment to convert computer-digitized tapes into sound. This

ignited Mathews creation of the programs Music I-V (Park 10).

Music I was created in 1957 using the IBM 704 computer because nothing else

could perform the sound processing. The actual computer was in New York, so they

would need to bring a digital magnetic tape back with them. It generated one

waveform, an equilateral triangular waveform, with the same rise and decay

characteristics. You could specify a pitch, and an amplitude, and a duration for each

note and that was it. At this time there were not many attempts to perform music with

computers. Music II followed one year later and was capable of four independent
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voices with a selection of 16 waveforms. The IBM 7094 computer was moved to Bell

Labs by this point (Roads 15-16).

Music III was introduced in 1960, and the concept of the unit generator was

introduced, which functioned as building blocks to make the production of music less

complicated and more accessible (Roads 17). The program simulated much like the

synthesizer of Moog, which came out at around the same time (Fuchs 39). Music IV

was necessary because the language and computer changed. The computers changed

again after, and new writing for the program was necessary, so Music V came out. With

Music V, Mathews decided to make a universal program to share the ability to compose

music with the rest of the world (Roads 17).

At Bell Labs, Mathews was able to collaborate with some noteworthy people of

that time. Initially, it was not musicians using the programs and systems at Bell Labs. It

was just scientists, namely Guttman and John Pierce. The first musician to come to Bell

Labs was David Lewin, who was at Harvard. The communication was mostly through

mail. After that, Pierce met Jim Tenney at the University of Illinois. Pierce took an

interest in Tenneys music and his enthusiasm for computers. Tenney was then invited

to join the work at Bell Labs. Jean-Claude Risset was sent to Bell Labs on a French

scholarship to complete a thesis in physics. Risset was analyzing the timbre of a

trumpet and developed a new system of analysis named analysis by synthesis (Roads

17-18).

Mathews also worked with Cage for some time. One collaboration ensued when

Cage envisioned a piece for orchestra where all the musicians would have contact

microphones and they would come into a big mixer. Originally, he hoped to have one
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loudness control for each musician, but [they] ended up with a compromise. [Mathews]

built the mixer for him (Park 16).

In the midst of starting another major project Dr. Mathews wrote The Technology

of Computer Music in 1969, giving an in-depth look at the functioning of computer-

based music. He also includes a manual for his Music V program.

Maxs next big project at Bell Labs was the GROOVE system, which was active

between 1968 and 1979. Mathews worked on this after the completion of Music V. The

GROOVE system was a hybrid system consisting of a minicomputer connected to an

analog sound synthesis system, with a number of input devices such as joysticks and

knobs for conducting a score which had been prepared beforehand and input to the

computer. The point about GROOVE was that it looked upon the score as a recording

of the control functions for the analog synthesizer. It recorded in a sampled form of

around 100 Hz, and would store this information on a disk. GROOVE allowed playback

with other instruments playing on different sensors. GROOVE also allowed editing of

the stored functions, so one sample could be altered without any effect on the rest of

the data. GROOVE also allowed a printout of this information, so the musician could go

back in and fix anything they needed to in real time. Mathews worked mainly with

Ghent and F. R. Moore on GROOVE (Roads 18-19).

In addition to the computer programs and languages Max developed, he also

crafted electronic instruments, one of which is the Sequential Drum. The Sequential

Drum is a sensor that is hit like a drum. The sensor tells when the drum is hit, how hard

it is hit, and the x and y coordinates of where the drum is hit. These three components

allow the computer reading them to synthesize a sound (Roads 19).

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One of Max Mathews most well known creations is his electronic violin.

Mathews carefully studied and analyzed the resonances of an actual violin and used

that information to create an electronic version possessing the same resonances. The

electronic violin allows energy levels, tuning, and the actual timbre of the instrument to

be completely modified. The violin can be changed to sound like a human voice,

trumpet, or any other instrument. There is also a large dynamic range to the electronic

violin, varying from the limited volume range of a normal violin (Roads 20-22). Mathews

was able to tune the thirty to sixty resonances also to tune for different performance

spaces. The transformation of the timbre was made possible by using low-pass filter to

create brassier sounds and band-pass filters to create more human voice-like sounds

(Boulanger 133-135).

People at this time were still uneasy about computer-generated music. The

reaction amongst all but a handful of people was a combination of skepticism, fear, and

a complete lack of comprehension. Amongst musicians, the group that was the most

interested in the computer was the composers, while the group that was the most

antagonistic to the computer was the performers. Computer music threatened the

knowledge and techniques that many performers had already developed (Roads 18).

Maxs own pieces featured a lot of robotic vocal type sounds. One of his most

famous pieces is his rendition of Bicycle Built for Two/ Daisy. It features heavy use of

synths and alterations of the sounds to feel mechanical. Maxs pieces are all very

contrasting, as he experimented with many aspects of sound. They range from

speaking alterations to organ to random noises (Box 9 9.37).

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Before Mathews died, his work concerned a slightly different kind of filter called

a phasor filter that is better behaved when you dynamically change the parameters of

the filter while at the same time passing a signal through the filter. These are single

resonant filters. One phasor he was working on was a vibrato filter where the vibrato is

not a change of pitch, but instead is a change in the resonant frequency (Park 17-18).

Although he is considered the father of electronic music, Mathews does not see

himself as a musician. He says, My training is as an engineer, and I consider that Im

not a composer, Im not a professional performer of any instrument. I do love music. If

Ive done anything, I am an inventor of new instruments, and almost all the instruments I

have invented are computer programs. I have built a few electronic violins (Park 22).

To this day, the use of the computer as an instrumentthat is, a sound

generatorremains at the heart of the multifaceted field we call computer music.

Many musicians still rely on the playback of digitally recorded sounds and real-time

processing of live sounds. Maxs creations are still affecting the current production of

electroacoustic music (Keislar 12).

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Works Cited

Boulanger, Richard. Toward a New Age of Performance: Reading the Book of

Dreams with the Mathews Electronic Violin. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 24,
no. 2, 1986, pp. 130155. JSTOR, JSTOR, <www.jstor.org/stable/833218>.

Box 9 9.37 Pictures / Daisy / Speech Sings / Elephants / Shepard's Tones

Risset, Max V. Mathews Papers (SC1107). Dept. of Special Collections and
University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif.

Fuchs, Mathias. Computer Music Languages... and the Real World. Leonardo.
Supplemental Issue, vol. 1, 1988, pp. 3942. JSTOR, JSTOR, <www.jstor.org/
stable/1557908>.

Keislar, Douglas. "A Historical View of Computer Music Technology." The Oxford
Handbook of Computer Music. : Oxford University Press, 2011-04-22. Oxford
Handbooks Online, 2012-09-18, <http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199792030.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199792030-e-002>.

Manning, Peter. "Sound Synthesis Using Computers." The Oxford Handbook of

Computer Music. : Oxford University Press, 2011-04-22. Oxford Handbooks
Online. 2012-09-18. <http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/
9780199792030.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199792030-e-004>.

Mathews, Max V. An Interview with Max Mathews. Interview by Tae Hong Park.
Computer Music Journal, vol. 33, no. 3, Fall 2009, pp. 9-22, <http://
www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/comj.2009.33.3.9>.

Mathews, Max V. Interview with Max Mathews. Interview by Curtis Roads.

Computer Music Journal, vol. 4, no. 4, Winter 1980, pp. 15-22, <https://
ccrma.stanford.edu/~aj/archives/docs/all/807.pdf>.

Mattis, Olivia. "Mathews, Max V.." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online.
Oxford University Press, Web, <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/
article/grove/music/47039>.