Max Mathews Music IV creation

The digital era of music essentially began in 1956 when Max Matthews and John Pierce were in the audience at a pretty underwhelming piano recital at Drew University, turned to one another and observed that a computer might not be able to play a tune but it could certainly do better than this.

That wouldn’t be a very bold statement today (though still a little mean), but in 1956 most computers couldn’t fit in your garage, and the only sound they made was the roar of white noise from fans and spinning magnetic tape drives. It was fortunate that the aspiring music critics were employees of Bell Labs and had access to them. A year later, Mathews wrote “Music I” (as in Roman numeral 1), the first computer program capable of synthesizing sound.

They kept at it (Matthews for the rest of his life) and 2024 marks the 60th anniversary of Music IV, the fourth iteration of the “Music” program and in many ways the reason that any of us are working in this industry today.

Music IV turned engineers into composers; with significantly less study than it would take to master an instrument, computer music could turn anyone into a music composer.

Coded by Mathews and Joan Miller, Music IV was created “to produce a sequence of numbers which can be converted to sound by means of a digital-to-analog converter and a smoothing filter,” according to its authors. If that sounds like a description of synthesized music written by engineers, you’re correct: that’s exactly what it was and that was the secret genius of the Music programs. It was a secret understood by its creators at Bell Labs but perhaps few others at the time. Music IV turned engineers into music composers; with significantly less study than it would take to master an instrument, computer music could turn anyone into a music composer.

The first sounds that were synthesized by Music I through Music IV were, by Mathews’ own admission, “not inspiring.” In 1957, Mathews and Newman Guttman had used Music I to wrote “The Silver Scale,” a composition less than 20 seconds long which is widely regarded as the first piece of music written on a computer.

Another piece — a rendition of “A Bicycle Built For Two” — was turned into the haunting final soliloquy of the HAL9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. That was a real experiment at Bell Labs, but didn’t sound dramatic enough for the death of a homicidal AI rampaging between the moons of Jupiter. Kubrick had access to the original recording but had it re-recorded for more dramatic effect.

To modern ears and perhaps to Kubrick, it sounds like music created by a calculator, and for the enjoyment of other calculators. But those frigid, sometimes uncanny robot squeals were a proof of concept: with enough computing power, numbers and equations would be able to generate almost any sound that could be imagined.

Harnessing that level of computing power was a ways off sixty years ago. About four years later, Music IV would be written in FORTRAN, as was Music V, the last version that Mathews co-authored.

Critically, Bell Labs did not copyright Music V, meaning it could be copied and improved by software developers in the future when cheap microchips would lead to exponential growth in computing power. Music IV was not just a breakthrough in music, but in coding — a progenitor of “open source” software. Bits of Music were built upon for decades by developers; spiritually at least it is the ancestor of every waveform we generate using our (to engineers in 1964, incomprehensibly) fast, cheap machines.

Mathews, Pierce and Miller had a vision that you wouldn’t need to be a musician to make digital music. Aided by a computer, you also wouldn’t need to learn to read and write notation to “record” music as you wrote it. After sixty years, you don’t even need to really know how music works to make it work. It’s frustrating sometimes, the ramifications of that music revolution launched in Bell Labs sixty years ago, but it’s still a hell of a thing to have lived through.

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