John Chowning and Max Mathews in conversation with Curtis Roads

John Chowning and Max Mathews, together with Jean-Claude Risset can be considered the most prominent pioneers in computer music synthesis. Their researches, results and software (begaun in the late ’50) are known worldwide and have influenced all computer music scenes.

Starting a few years ago, they recall their experiences in several seminars that are worth attending. I was lucky to be present at one of them in Bourges (France) in June 2005. It was spectacular, and moving and they explained their complicated early outcomes in an amusing and absolutely cool way.

I am trying to save all the video of their conferences from the web. These materials are historical witnesses of an important era: everyone who is interested in vintage computer music technology should watch and archive them.

This one is a seminar John Chowning and Max Mathews gave with Curtis Roads (another very important name for Computer Music, as composer and researcher, especially for his fundamental book The Computer Music Tutorial). The Computer History Museum interview was December 14, 2004. Watch it here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7185099725785108063#.

More about John Chowning: CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University) and Wikipedia.

More about Max Mathews: here.