News

Computer scientist and composer Barry Vercoe, creator of the Csound programming language, died on 15 June 2025. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Vercoe studied music and mathematics at the undergraduate level and completed doctoral studies in music under Ross Lee Finney at the University of Michigan. He taught at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (1965–1967) and served as a visiting lecturer at the Yale School of Music before joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an assistant professor of humanities. Vercoe founded MIT's Experimental Music Studio in 1973 and was a founding member of the MIT Media Lab in 1984, heading its Music, Mind, and Machine group, pursuing advances in machine listening and digital audio synthesis.Vercoe was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982–1983, developing the Synthetic Performer real-time interactive accompaniment system in conjunction with the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). In 1985, Vercoe created Csound, which built on the seminal MUSIC-N language series created by Max Mathews, cemented the foundations of digital audio, and in turn influenced the Structured Audio extensions to the MPEG-4 audiovisual data format. He won the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. Retiring from MIT in 2010 and relocating to Tauranga, New Zealand, in 2015, Vercoe co-founded and served as a director of the One Education Foundation, an Australia-based offshoot from the One Laptop per Child initiative. Vercoe was interviewed in Computer Music Journal Volume 23, Issue 4 (1999).Web: web.media.mit.edu/∼bvAlgorithmic composition innovator David Cope died on 4 May 2025 of congestive heart failure at the age of 83. Born in San Francisco, California, and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, Cope studied music at Arizona State University and the University of Southern California. He taught briefly at Kansas State College, California Lutheran College, Marymount College, Prairie View A&M University, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Miami University (Ohio) before joining the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1977, later serving as provost of Porter College and dean of the arts there.With experience in creative coding for music, beginning in the 1970s with punch cards, Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI, pronounced as “Emmy”) began in the late 1980s, initially to get past a creative block for a commission to write an opera. The software analyzed his previous compositions and generated new material in that style, preceding later developments in machine learning and generative music. Cope then applied this approach to celebrated composers of past eras, raising important questions regarding authorship, authenticity, aesthetics, creativity, and ethics that have drawn much attention with the recent boom in generative applications of deep learning. Pulitzer-winning computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter publicly spoke on the implications of Cope's work in the late 1990s, even featuring EMI's music as part of a musical Turing test.Cope published many books, book chapters, and journal articles on computers in music creation as well as contemporary composition and musical structure more generally, and, most recently, Ethics of Computer-Assisted Music (2022). His albums span 30 years and range from Virtual Mozart (1997) to From Darkness, Light (2009), composed by EMI's successor, a computer program that Cope named Emily Howell. The New York Times has called Cope the “godfather” of artificial intelligence in music. Cope was interviewed in Computer Music Journal Volume 31, Issue 3 (2007) on “Composing with Algorithms.” He is remembered in the 2021 documentary, Opus Cope: An Algorithmic Opera, directed by Jae Shim.Cognitive scientist and musicologist David Huron died on 5 June 2025. Huron was born in Peace River, Alberta, Canada, and studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, the University of Waterloo, York University, and the University of Nottingham. Huron began teaching at the University of Waterloo and joined the Ohio State University in 1988, teaching music theory and cognitive science. Huron's foundational contributions at the nexus of music and cognition are demonstrated in his book titles, including Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (2006), Voice Leading: The Science behind a Musical Art (2016), and The Science of Sadness: A New Understanding of Emotion (2024), growing from Huron's Humdrum Toolkit for computational musicology, developed since the 1980s.In 2017, Huron won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, and he is among the three most recent recipients of the Lifetime Membership award from the Society for Music Theory (all in 2019). Huron published “Music Information Processing Using the Humdrum Toolkit: Concepts, Examples, and Lessons” in Computer Music Journal Volume 26, Issue 2 (2002).The 50th International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) took place June 8–14 2025 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, hosted by Northeastern University, Berklee College of Music, the New England Conservatory, the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Emerson College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The conference theme “Curiosity, Play, Innovation” was a tribute to the memory of David Wessel (1942–2014), who organized the first ICMC at Michigan State University in 1974. The conference opened with a tribute and concert honoring Wessel, announcing the release of a festschrift celebrating his contributions, with statements and performances from Wessel's esteemed colleagues, including George Lewis, John Chowning, Miller Puckette, Mary Simoni, Marc Battier, David Zicarelli, Adrian Freed, Laetitia Sonami, Tod Machover, Matt Wright, Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Roscoe Mitchell, Richard Dudas, and Gérard Assayag.Among the keynote speakers, Richard Boulanger gave a retrospective review of his adventures in computer music, paying tribute to Max Mathews as well as Barry Vercoe, who died the day after the conference ended. Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang spoke on creative partnerships between humans and artificial intelligence, and Georg Hajdu shared the origin of the ligeti center (Laboratories for Innovation and General-audience Edification through the Translation of Ideas), which opened in 2023 in Hamburg, Germany. Panel sessions included discussions on artificial intelligence, quantum computer music, selected soundwalk artists, and composers selected for the special MIT call for scores. The conference included a total of 26 concerts, 18 paper sessions, a gallery of nine installations with a screening room for eight installation videos, 17 soundwalks delivered through a mobile application, four workshops, eight listening room sessions, and an innovation showcase.Web: icmc2025.sites.northeastern.eduThe Haus für Musik und Musiktheater (MUMUTH) in Graz, Austria, hosted the 22nd Sound and Music Computing (SMC) Conference, 7–12 July 2025, with 140 participants from 29 countries and five continents, presenting four concert performances and an installation walk including 11 works. Keynote speaker Jana Winderen encouraged attendees to listen “with” the environment, in immersive participation, and Till Bovermann reflected on how various supporting infrastructures shape creative practices. Paper sessions focused on education, interaction, hardware, perception and emotion, synthesis and audiovisual work, and spatial and networked music.Web: smc25.iem.at

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.