Computer music pioneer Max Mathews has died from pneumonia at age 84 in San Francisco, his son said.

Mathews, often called the father of computer music, wrote the first program to enable a computer to synthesize sound and play it back, the New York Times reported.

… His first computer program was written for the IBM 704 mainframe computer when he was an engineer at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., in 1957. It played a then-amazing 17-second composition devised by Mathews.

“The timbres and notes were not inspiring,” Mathews told a conference on computer music at Indiana University in 1997, “but the technical breakthrough is still reverberating.”

– upi.com

Max Mathews @ Wikipedia

Max Mathews Radio Baton Demonstration @ YouTube