2004 SEAMUS Lifetime Acheivement Award

Barry Vercoe

Barry Vercoe, Professor of Music and Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, and Assoc Academic Head of the Program in Media Arts & Sciences is the recipient of the 2004 SEAMUS LIfetime Achievement Award.

Vercoe was born and educated in New Zealand in music and in mathematics, then completed a doctorate in Music Composition at the University of Michigan. In 1968 at Princeton University Vercoe did pioneering work in th field of Digital Audio Processing, then taught briefly at Yale before joining the MIT faculty in 1971. In 1973 he established the MIT computer facility for Experimental Music -- an event now commemorated on a plaque in the Kendall Square subway station. During the '70's and early 80's he pioneered composition combining computers and live instruments .


On a Guggenheim Fellowship in Paris in 1983 Barry Vencoe developed a Synthetic Performer -- a computer that could listen to other performers and play its own part in musical sync, even learning from rehearsals. In 1992 he won the Computer World / Smithsonian Award in Media Arts and Entertainment.

Professor Vercoe was a founding member of the MIT Media Laboratory in 1984, where he has pursued research in Music Cognition and Machine Understanding. His several Music Synthesis languages are used around the world, and a variant of his Csound and NetSound languages has recently been adopted as the core of MPEG-4 audio -- an international standard that enables efficient transmission of audio over the Internet. At the Media Lab