Computer Music: a brief history about it

Computer music has emerged in the 50s with Max Mathews, an eletric engineer at Bell Labs. He is called "the father of computer music". Mathews is a leader in research of digital audio, synthesis and human-computer interaction in musical performance. He invented the first program extensively used for sound generation: MUSIC I.

Max Matthews

MUSIC I had just one voice, triangular waveform and have the control of sound duration, intensity and tuning.

In 1957 an IBM 704, in New York, played a composition of 17 seconds generated by MUSIC I. It was the first time that a computer played a sound. It had not inspiring notes but it was a great technical advance. MUSIC I has inspired the development of languages and APIs to work with sound in a computer:
- MUSIC II to V
- MUSIC 10, MUSIC 360, MUSIC 15
- Csound
- Java Sound

The traditional synthesizers (analog keyboards with oscillators and pots) evolved and became an amazing line of products that covers sound modules and synthesizers softwares.

In 1983 arised MIDI - the Musical Instrument Digital Interface. Its goal was to standardize the communication between electronic instruments.

Nowadays, computer music is widely used over internet. Web radio-stations and online music composition are some examples. Also it is been developed some instruments based on virtual reality, laser, artificial intelligence.

What future do we have ahead? New kinds of musical instruments, new styles of music, new forms to record music and sound, new forms to analyse a sound, new ways to use the sound ?

Computer Music: Have you ever heard about it?

Computer music is the name given to the area of Computer Science that study the computer application in solving musical and sonic problems. It's like a cousin of Computer Graphics. While the second studies methods, techniques and algorithms for processing, generation, digital representation and storage of images, the other investigates methods, techniques and algorithms for music and sound generation, digital representations and storage of musical and sonic information.


It's a strongly interdisciplinary area. It has foundations in mathematics and music but it contains concepts linked to psychology, physiology, physics, engineering. You can see this in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. There are cathegories like "Underwater Sound", "Music and Musical instruments", "Psychological Acoustics", "Physiological Acoustics", among others.


To know Computer Music is not to know just computers and music. It involves a large knowledge in mathematics and physical fundamentals. Besides it, it covers interesting computational problems like:
- real-time device controls
- interaction with users without knowledge in computation
- musical knowledge representation

In summary, computer music deal with a large variety of problems. As an example, see the topics of interest in Brazilian Symposium of Computer and Music (2007):
- Acoustics, and sound broadcasting
- Artificial Intelligence
- Artificial life and evolutionary music systems
- Design of audio equipment
- Digital processing of audio signals
- Computer-aided musical analysis
- Computer-assisted music education
- Musicology aided by computer
- Music distributed
- Internet and Web applications
- Music and audio systems and multimedia applications
- Structure and representation of musical data
- Recovery of musical information
- Musical notation, printing and optical recognition.
- QoS for audio systems
- Psychoacoustics and Cognitive Modeling
- Interactive systems for real-time
- Software, systems and languages for composition
- Synthesis of sound

Next post I'll talk about the history of this discipline. See you!