Vercoe, Barry

Vercoe, Barry, New Zealand-born American composer and computer-music specialist; b. Wellington, July 24, 1937. He was educated at the Univ. of Auckland (Mus.B. in composition, 1959; B.A. in mathematics, 1962) and the Univ. of Mich. (A.Mus.D., 1968). After completing postdoctoral research at Princeton Univ. (1968-70), he served as U.S. adviser to the UNESCO Joint European Studies Committee on Technology and Arts (1977-78); he also was resident composer /researcher at IRCAM (1983-84), where he developed “cpmusic,” a system for synchronizing computerprocessed sound with live instruments by computer tracking of performers in real time. He was a visiting lecturer at the Yale Univ. School of Music (1970-71) then joined the faculty at the Mass. Inst. of Technology, first as an assoc. prof, in its dept. of humanities (1971-85) and then as a prof, in its dept. of media arts and sciences (from 1985). His work in psychoacoustic and computer music research has been supported by sizable grants from the National Science Foundation (1976, 1987-89), the NEA (1978-82), and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1981), among others. He held a Guggenheim fellowship (1982-83). His developments in the field of computer audio systems include “Music-11” (1976; in 1984, rewritten to “Csound”), for fast digital processing of audio on PDP-11 minicomputers, and “MUSIC 360” (1969), a programming language used for processing sound on large IBM machines. He is married to Elizabeth Vercoe.

Works

Digressionsfor Band, 2 Choruses, Computer, and Orch. (1968); Synthesismfor Computer (1970); Synapse Ifor Viola and Computer (1976) and IIfor Flute and 4X Processor (1984).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire