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Barry Vercoe

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Barry Lloyd Vercoe (born 1937) is a New Zealand-born computer scientist and composer.

Vercoe received undergraduate degrees in music (1959) and mathematics (1962) from the University of Auckland before emigrating to the United States. While employed as an assistant professor at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (1965-1967) and the Contemporary Music Project's Seattle/Tacoma composer-in-residence (1967-1968), he completed his D.M.A. in composition from the University of Michigan in 1968.[1] During a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University, his research in digital audio processing paved the way for the subsequent evolution of digital musical composition. From 1970 to 1971, he served as a visiting lecturer at the Yale School of Music.

In 1971, Vercoe became an assistant professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he established the MIT Experimental Music Studio in 1973. In 1977, he joined the Lab for Computer Science as an associate member. He became a founding member of the MIT Media Lab in 1984 and continues to this day as professor emeritus of music and media arts. For many years, he directed research in machine listening and digital audio synthesis as head of the Lab's Music, Mind, and Machine group and served as associate academic head of its graduate program in media arts and sciences from 2000 until his retirement in 2010. His notable students include Susan Frykberg, Miller Puckette and Paris Smaragdis. As of 2015, he resides in Tauranga.[2]

He is best known as the inventor of Csound, a music synthesis language with wide usage among computer music composers. SAOL, the underlying language for the MPEG-4 Structured Audio standard, is also historically derived from Csound.

He is also an accomplished jazz musician.[citation needed]

See also