Barry Vercoe, composer and music scientist, founded MIT’s electronic music efforts and helped shape the Lab’s efforts in digital synthesis and machine listening and learning. But his biggest impact came outside the academy: as the inventor of Csound, he took the original innovations of Max Mathews and made them accessible to everyone. The live coding scene that followed has transformed the practice of coding sound into a new form of musical performance.
Max’s musical synthesis language, originally dubbed simply “Music,” was ingenious. But you could only use it via elite US institutions; think funding from Bell Labs, universities, and even the US military (via DARPA). The truth is, the elegance of Max’s language might easily have faded into memory.
Barry was the one who made Csound appear everywhere. That draws a direct line that runs from Max’s first experiments at the end of the 1950s to the latest tech today. Its DNA is baked into the MPEG-4 spec. And it isn’t stopping, either, because not only is it available via a variety of environments, but by influencing many other coding languages, including new live coding environments.
That means essentially anyone who can get their hands on any computational device–new, used, embedded, dirt cheap–has access to the same powers.
The news of Barry’s passing comes via Dr. Richard Boulanger. I’ll let him tell the story in full.
It is with great sadness that I bring you the news of the passing of my dear friend and mentor, Barry Vercoe – the father of Csound.
On Father’s Day, I received a call from his son, Scotty, who told me that he had passed.
Although Barry’s health had been failing, I am happy to report that I was able to Zoom with Barry this past October, before the International Csound Conference in Vienna. I was able to share with him how Csound continues to live and grow and inspire: on the Web, on the Bela, on the Daisy, in the Qu-Bit Nebulae and Scanned Eurorack Modules, in VCV Rack, through the support for Live Coding, through the incredible Cabbage IDE, through the cool Puremagnetik plugins, in VR and XR via CsoundUnity and CsoundMeta, and especially Csound in the “Kia” EV6 car, (and the ‘Movement’ Csound-Cabbage synth https://worldwide.kia.com/int/sounds-in-nature/our-instrument that they designed and gave away with the car https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4egz2QiKzE), and in the cool hardware and software Csound-synth by “Coke” called Sound-Z (https://www.coca-cola.com/us/en/offerings/cokesoundz). He was pretty excited!
In the summer of 1979, I attended Barry’s Workshops in Computer Music at MIT and composed “Trapped in Convert.” While working on my PhD at UC San Diego with Dick Moore between 1981-85, Barry visited and installed “music11” on our PDP11 so that I could continue, secretly, composing and designing instruments and effects with his software, while focusing my research on Moore’s “cmusic” language. When I returned to Boston in 1985, Barry invited me to work with him at MIT on his new Csound project, and it is there and then that our lifelong collaboration and deep friendship developed.
I would meet him at 6 a.m. every morning, and we would leave at 6 p.m. every evening. I would spend the days testing his code and making sounds and instruments with all the new opcodes he was adding as he built upon his “music11” foundation and turned it into the mighty Csound. I wrote a set of tutorials that Barry added to the manual. Over the years, we delivered papers, we gave demos, and we played concerts. We worked on The Csound Book. We worked on the Analog Devices’ SHARCsound project (with Scotty Vercoe, Lee Ray, and John ffitch), and we worked on the $100 laptop project (One Laptop Per Child – OLPC), and so much more.
I have so many wonderful memories and am so grateful for all the support and knowledge that Barry shared with me. He built me the synthesizer of my dreams. He built all of us the most amazing and inspiring instrument. And he gave it away. I can’t begin to thank him for all the gifts his work bestowed on me, my teaching, my career, and my musical life.
I will end this note with one last story.
Last week, I gave a keynote at the 50th International Computer Music Conference (ICMC2025). A lot of it was about Max Mathews and Barry Vercoe and how their friendship was the spirit from which the field of computer music has blossomed. In the middle of my keynote, I premiered a new work entitled “Csound Dreams in the MetaVerse.” The piece features all of my instruments from “Trapped” (and many new ones too) that can now be hit, squeezed, stretched, and tossed about in immersive AI-generated 3D worlds. Our “CsoundMeta” software, which brings the Csound language into the “Unity” game engine, allows me to jam and play with musicians locally and remotely – to bring players together from all over the world and play with them in my studio, or on the moon! And so, playing with me live on stage were five alumni from Berklee, and we were joined remotely on stage by two alumni, one from Ohio (the CsoundMeta genius software developer, Strong Bear), and another from Paris, France. As you might well imagine with any premier, especially in a new venue with limited setup and soundcheck time, there were a lot of technical (Wi-Fi router) issues. Things sort of worked, but just barely, and so we were all praying that the piece would not crash. The visuals I was casting for the audience did lag a bit, but things seemed to be going smoothly. Then, a few minutes before the very end of the piece, we all hear the sound of my Quest3 headset running out of power…. du..du..du..du..du…du… By some miracle, and I think I know now who was watching and listening from heaven, the system kept running and we made it to the end of the piece, an end that featured a beautiful lullaby, for Barry, that I was humming, and that Bethanie Liu, on acoustic recorder, was imitating. Both of our “voices” were shimmering in a heavenly landscape on another world. When I told my students about Barry’s passing, one shared her belief with me that Barry was joining us from heaven, sharing my and his “Csound Dream.”
I have always believed that music speaks to us, resonates in us, and connects us on a deeply spiritual level. Barry’s spirit lives in me and in all of us who use Csound, who contribute to Csound, and who continue to learn, discover, and create with Csound. Barry, I miss you. We all miss you. And I hope that you knew, and now know, how grateful I am, and so many of us are, for this amazing gift that continues to teach and inspire all of us.
This is doubly strange to me, as just last week I was interviewing John Chowning, and he was talking about the impact of code through MUSIC and Csound. Barry is such a key link in that story, not only through his technological contributions, but the number of people he connected with the power of his teaching and advocacy. My heart goes out to Barry’s family, friends, students, and colleagues.
At a time when it seems like coding might disappear, replaced by some black-box, passive exchanges with an LLM, I think this is a reminder of the endurance of the craft of code in sound. I even think more people may seek it out, bored by the bland, sometimes broken boilerplate spit out by AI bots. You wouldn’t let AI write poetry for you. Barry showed even the most code-averse of us that sound code can be poetry. It’s something you wouldn’t want to leave to anyone else: it’s a direct connection to your thoughts.
But you read this site. You like pushing the envelope and taking your time. So I’m sure if you’ve gotten this far, you’ll enjoy sitting back with these interviews, too.
Interview: Barry Vercoe at Radio New Zealand (other great music interviews there, too)
In this video from MIT Libraries, he brings up Paul Desmond, too:
In the follow up, they go deeper into technology and organizing sound and performance:
There’s this interview, as well (seems undated).
But let’s hop in the time machine, as here is – at the beginning, ca. 1973, I think? – some DEC PDP11 action! (Looking actually quite impressive for the time…)
Actually that viola + electronics solo is cool; let’s program that now.
More 1970s beard energy, and a keyboard that has weirdly come back into style. (Thanks mechanical keyboard aficionados and Severance!)
Barry’s compositions hold up. He even makes it sound here like it isn’t a horrible experience trying to code for the IBM/360. (Oh… I’m sure it was a horrible experience. Again, though, great clacky keyboards.) Ca. 1969-1970:
His “Synthetic Performer” was an early breakthrough in machine listening and accompaniment – one that remains impressive and musical today. Here he is in 1984 in Paris with Larry Beauregard of the Boulez Ensemble showing it playing along with a flutist.
I hesitate to even use the word “innovation.” But Barry is a great person to describe what the whole innovation thing is about, and how it relates to a center like the MIT Media Lab. Hilariously, we also find out in this video that the whole “media” thing is Barry’s fault.
As we look at the world and I hope think about recentering it from exclusive US institutions, all those insights can challenge us to imagine new centers – as viral as Barry’s ideas, Csound, and his dreams.
These are ideas that will live on.