Max Mathews & John Chowning

In this long conversation with Curtis Roads, composer and musicologist, Max Mathews & John Chowning retrace various stages in the history of Computer Music.

Starting in the 1950s, Max Mathews was the first to create a series of software that allowed computers to produce and control sound: the MUSIC I, II, III series, up to MUSIC V, widely used, among others, by Jean Claude Risset to synthesize some famous songs from the 1970s, but above all to carry out research and make clear the possibilities offered by digital audio.

John Chowning, percussionist, composer, and researcher, is known as the inventor of frequency modulation (FM) for sound synthesis, a technique developed in the 1970s and later sold to Yamaha, which applied it in a long series of commercial synthesizers, including the DX7 (1983), which remains the best-selling synth in history.

The video also includes a performance by pianist Chryssie Nanou of J. C. Risset's Duet for One Pianist, in which the pianist plays a Yamaha grand piano equipped with a MIDI controller and duets with a computer that "listens" to the performance and in turn sends MIDI commands to the same instrument, whose keys begin to lower on their own in a four-handed piano with a ghost.

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