Miller Puckette

Miller Smith Puckette (born 1959) is the associate director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts as well as a professor of music at the University of California, San Diego, where he has been since 1994. Puckette is known for authoring Max, a graphical development environment for music and multimedia synthesis, which he developed while working at IRCAM in the late 1980s. He is also the author of Pure Data (Pd), a real-time performing platform for audio, video and graphical programming language for the creation of interactive computer music and multimedia works, written in the 1990s with input from many others in the computer music and free software communities.

Biography

Miller Puckette got involved in computer music in 1979 at MIT with Barry Vercoe. In 1979 he became a Putnam Fellow. He earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1986 after completing an undergraduate degree at MIT in 1980. He was a member of the MIT Media Lab from its opening in 1985 until 1987 before continuing his research at IRCAM, and since 1997 has been a part of the Global Visual Music project. He used Max to complete his first work, which is called Pluton from the second work of Manoury' series called Sonus ex Machina. He is the 2008 SEAMUS Award Recipient. On May 11, 2011, he received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Mons.

On July 21, 2012, he received an Honorary Degree from Bath Spa University in recognition of his extraordinary contribution to computer music research.

Selected publications

For a full list, see: http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/publications.html

• Puckette, Miller (2007). The theory and technique of electronic music. World Scientific. ISBN 978-981-270-077-3. 
• Puckette, Miller (2004) “Who Owns our Software?: A first-person case study” Proceedings, ISEA, pp. 200–202, republished in September 2009 issue of Montréal: Communauté électroacoustique canadienne / Canadian Electroacoustic Community.
• Puckette, Miller (2002) "Max at seventeen". Computer Music Journal 26(4): pp. 31–43.