Barry Vercoe
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Barry Lloyd Vercoe (born 1937) is a New Zealand-born computer scientist and composer. 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.
Born in Wellington, 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 as 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] In 1965, he married fellow composer and Michigan graduate student Elizabeth Vercoe; they had two children before divorcing in the early 1990s. 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 at the behest of president Jerome Wiesner, who harbored musical inclinations (having previously collaborated with Alan Lomax) and sought to establish an electronic music laboratory as a logical extension of the institution's mandate; this led to the formation of the MIT Experimental Music Studio under the direction of Vercoe 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, where he co-founded and directs One Education, an offshoot of the One Laptop per Child initiative.[2]
He is also an accomplished jazz musician.[citation needed]
See also
External links
- Barry Vercoe homepage
- Vercoe demonstrating the Synthetic Performer at IRCAM in 1984 on YouTube
- Barry Vercoe Playlist Appearance on WMBR's Dinnertime Sampler radio show, November 10, 2004
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