SJSU, MAX/MSP & the Roots of Computer Music

"Several of those manuals accompanied the original versions of MAX, an object-oriented programming environment that David Zicarelli and Miller Puckette created in the late '80s. SJSU music students were among the first undergraduates to use MAX for any creative purposes."

"To make a long story short, as the '90s began, personal computers were not yet powerful enough to digitally process audio in real time, so Miller was working on a DSP version of MAX that ran on a NeXT Machine, while Opcode sold a MIDI version of MAX that composers and performers used for patching various operations together."

"Everything that Zicarelli and Puckette worked on 35 years ago provided technological inspiration for the Electro-acoustic music concentration started by professor Allen Strange in the SJSU School of Music. At the time, Allen's program was revolutionary, inseparable from Silicon Valley history."

MAX, developed by David Zicarelli and Miller Puckette in the late 1980s, emerged as a groundbreaking object-oriented programming environment for music creation. SJSU music students were among the first undergraduates to use MAX creatively. Initially, personal computers lacked sufficient power for real-time audio processing, so separate versions existed: a DSP version for NeXT Machines and a MIDI version sold by Opcode. As computing power increased, these merged into MAX/MSP. Professor Allen Strange at SJSU established a revolutionary electro-acoustic music concentration inspired by this technological innovation, offering students an alternative to traditional performance, composition, history, jazz, or music education concentrations.

Read at Metro Silicon Valley | Silicon Valley's Leading Weekly