While the explosion of digital influences in music originates in the development of signal processing circuitry fast enough to produce digital sound upon demand, the roots of computer music go much farther back. It took several hours to produce a single sound in 1957, when Max Mathews wrote the first computer music synthesis program! Influences from many areas of computer science have contributed to the development of the area (for example, in the work of Charles Dodge in the 1960s on applying speech synthesis algorithms to composition). More recently, computer music has grown to include multimedia works, in which a computer interacts with live performers to produce both music and video graphics, as in Roger Dannenberg's works.
Indiana University Computer Science Department and School of Music invite you to a weekend of lectures and music, spanning the field of computer music from the earliest beginnings to the cutting edge.