120 Years of Electronic Music
Electronic Musical Instrument 1870 - 1990
Computer Music: Music1-V & GROOVE


Max Mathews

MUSIC 1, which was quickly replaced by MUSIC II running on an IBM 704 and written in assembler code was the first real computer synthesis programme, developed by Max Mathews of Bell Laboratories in 1957.
MUSIC III was written in 1959 for the new generation of IBM transistorised 7094 machines which were much faster and easier to use than the older models. The MUSIC series software went through a stage of elvolution folowing the deleopment of the IBM computer whhich ended in 1968 with MUSIC V written in FORTRAN and running on the IBM 360 machines.
MUSIC V was picked up and developed by various other programmers such as Barry vercoe at MIT who designed MUSIC 360 and MUSIC 10 by John Chowning and James Moorer at Stanford University.

The GROOVE System (1970) (Generated Real-time Output Operations on Voltage-controlled Equipment)

in 1970, Mathews pioneered GROOVE (Generated Real-time Output Operations on Voltage-controlled Equipment), the first fully developed hybrid system for music synthesis, utilising a HoneywellDDP-224 computer with a simple cathode ray tube display, disk and tape storgae devices. The synthesiser generated sounds via an interface for analogue devices and two 12 bit digital to analogue convertors. Input deices consisted of a qwerty keyboard a 24 note keyboard, four rotary knobs and a three dimensional rotary joystick.

Mathews saw the function of the GROOVE system as being a compositional tool which the composer/conductor manipulates in real time:

"The composer does not play every note in a (traditional) score, instead he influences (hopefully controls) the way in which the instrumentalists play the notes. The computer performer should not attempt to define the entire sound in real time. Instead the computer should retain a score and the performer should influence the way in which the score is played..... the mode of conducting consist of turning knobs and pressing keys rather than waving a stick, but this is a minor detail.......The programme is basically a system for creating storing, retrieving and editing functions of time. It allows the composition of time functions byt turning knobs and pressing keys in real time: it sotores the functions on the disk file, it retrieves the stored functions (the score), combines them with the input functions (the conductor) in order to generate control functions which drive the analogue synthesiser and it provides for facile editing of functions via control of the programme time..."


The GROOVE System at the Bell Telephone Labs , c1970 		The GROOVE system remained in operation until the end of the seventies when Honeywell withdrew form the computer market.Max Mathews (Now professor emeritus at Stanford) is still actively involved in digital music performance. His "radio baton" hyperinstrument allows him to conduct a computer orchestra by simply waving a wand over an electromagnetic field. The father of computer music predicts that by 2010, "almost all music will be made electronically, by digital circuits."

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