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Miller Puckette

*1959 US
Composer
A.k.a. Miller Smith Puckette

Miller Puckette (b. 1959) is an American electronic music composer, software developer, recipient of SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award (2008) and professor at the Department of Music at the University of California, San Diego. He joined UCSD in 1994 and worked as an Associate Director of Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) from 2000 to 2011. Puckette is best known as the author of Max, a visual programming language for digital synthesis and multimedia, which he developed at IRCAM in the late 1980s. Miller Puckette got involved in computer music with Barry Vercoe at MIT in 1979, where he was obtaining B.S. in Mathematics. After receiving Ph. D. in Mathematics from Harvard, he joined MIT Media Lab and stayed there until 1987. Puckette then moved to Paris and started working at IRCAM, where he wrote Max (named after the pioneer of electronic music Max Mathews). IRCAM licensed a commercial version of the software to Opcode Systems in 1990. Currently, Max is developed by Cycling '74. In 1989, Miller created an enhanced version of Max with added real-time audio processing called Max/FTS, for the ISPW system. ISPW (The IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation) was developed by the Institute with Ariel Corporation. It was a $12,000 expansion DSP-card for NeXT Computer with two Intel i860 microprocessors running at 80 MFLOPS. An additional card with eight audio I/O channels for multi-channel sound recording and playback was also available. Up to three ISPW boards could be installed on a single workstation, providing an unsurpassed computing power for signal processing and audio synthesis. Max/FTS consisted of two separate components: a client application Max for NeXTSTEP operating system providing GUI, and a real-time audio processing server FTS (for "Faster Than Sound") running on the ISPW's i860 processors. Eventually, Max/FTS migrated to a software-only application for SGI and DEC Alpha computers. In 1996, the IRCAM team started re-implementing Max/FTS graphical user interface in Java with multi-platform support, and eventually it was distributed as an open-source jMax. Currently, Puckette is developing Pure Data (Pd), an open-source real-time multimedia programming environment. He has collaborated with many artists and musicians, including Philippe Manoury, Juliana Snapper, Rand Steiger, and Vibeke Sorensen.

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