Max Vernon Mathews has been called the father of computer music. He created electronic tools so that people could use computers as musical instruments. He had a huge influence on the development of electronic music and how it is written, recorded and played.
In 1957, Max Mathews wrote the first computer program that enabled a computer to create sound and play it back. At the time, he was working as an engineer at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. His computer program was called Music. It enabled a large IBM computer to play a seventeen-second piece of music that he had written.
The computer was so slow that it would have taken an hour to play the piece of music in seventeen seconds. For that reason, Mathews moved the work to a tape player, which could be sped up to play the music at a normal speed. He later said that the sound quality of the musical notes was not great, but the technical importance of the music was huge.
The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke visited Bell Laboratories in the 1960s. He heard a computer "sing" the song "Daisy Bell" on devices and programs developed by Max Mathews and other engineers. Clarke noted this technology in his book 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was later made into a movie.
Mathews continued creating other versions of the Music program. He became interested in how computers could help musicians outside recording studios. The Groove program he developed was the first computer program made for live performances. He also developed an electronic device he called the Radio Baton. The device looks like two drum sticks. It enables the user to control the speed and sound levels of orchestral music played on a computer. The user does this by moving the two sticks on a special electronic surface.
Max Mathews believed modern musicians are not making full use of the power of computer music. He said a violin always sounds like a violin. But with a computer, the way a violin sounds is unlimited. He said he did not want computer sounds to replace live music. But he said he hoped laptop computers would one day be considered serious instruments.