Quick Facts
Biography
Barry Vercoe is a New Zealand-born computer scientist and composer. He completed his undergraduate degree in New Zealand in Music and Mathematics and went on to complete a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, United States, in Music Composition. In 1968, Vercoe's research in Digital Audio Processing paved the way for the subsequent evolution of digital musical composition. In 1971, he joined the faculty at MIT and established the Experimental Music facility in 1973. Vercoe was a founding member of the MIT Media Lab in 1984. He continues to this day at the laboratory as a professor of Music and Media Arts and as an Associate Head of the Academic program in Media, Arts and Sciences. Notable students include Susan Frykberg and Miller Puckette.
He is best known as the inventor of Csound, a music synthesis language with wide usage among computer music composers. SAOL, the underlying language for the MPEG-4 Structured Audio standard, is also historically derived from Csound.
He is also an accomplished jazz musician.