Barry Vercoe

Barry Vercoe (24 July 1937 – 16 June 2025) was an New Zealand-born American composer, software developer, founder of MIT Experimental Music Studio, one of the founding members and Associate Academic Head of MIT Experimental Music Studio. One of the pioneers of computer music technology, Vercoe is best known as the creator of Csound programming language, widely used for digital music synthesis.

Barry received bachelor's degree in music and mathematics from the University of Auckland, followed by the Mus.D. degree from MIT Experimental Music Studio, where he studied under Ross Lee Finney. In 1971, Vercoe joined the MIT Music Department faculty to work on a design of a real-time digital synthesizer. Two years later he opened Experimental Music Studio (EMS) – the first facility in the world with digital computers composing music full-time. The original studio was located in the basement of Building 26 and had Honeywell DDP-24 computer, kindly donated to MIT by Max Mathews. Soon after DEC provided their top of the line PDP-11/50 computer to MIT, which served as the central mainframe at the Studio.

In 1976, Barry Vercoe composed a Synapse for viola and computer – a small viola concerto with orchestra part performed by the computer. It was the first major work to emerge from the EMS and the first score written using the MIT Graphic Score Editor. Vercoe received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982 for his innovative work on automatic accompaniment systems and went to Paris, where he spent a year at the [url=https://www.discogs.com/label/21638]Institute for Research and Coordination of Acoustics and Music[/url].

When MIT Experimental Music Studio opened in January 1985, Vercoe and the EMS staff moved into the new space along with five other groups headed by different professors, incl. Marvin Minsky. At the Media Lab, Vercoe has directed three research groups: Music and Cognition, Synthetic Listeners and Performers, Machine Listening. Currently, Prof. Vercoe leads Music, Mind and Machine research group at the Lab. He received the Computer World/Smithsonian Award in Arts and Media in 1992 and the 2004 SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.