Video History Project

People

Miller Puckette

Miller Puckette obtained a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT (1980) and Ph. D. in Mathematics from Harvard (1986). Puckette was a member of MIT's Media Lab from its inception until 1987, and then a researcher at IRCAM (l'Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Musique/Acoustique, founded by composer and conductor Pierre Boulez). There he wrote the Max program for MacIntosh computers, which was first distributed commercially by Opcode Systems in 1990 and is now available from Cycling74.com.

In 1989 Puckette joined IRCAM's "musical workstation" team and put together an enhanced version of Max, called Max/FTS, for the ISPW system, which was commercialized by Ariel, Inc. This system became a widely used platform in computer music research and production facilities. The IRCAM real-time development team has since reimplemented and extended this software under the name jMax, which is distributed free with source code.

Puckette joined the Music department of the University of California, San Diego in 1994, and is now Associate Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). He is currently working on a new real-time software system for live musical and multimedia performances called Pure Data ("Pd"), in collaboration with many other artists/researchers/programmers worldwide. Pd is free and runs on Linux, IRIX, and Windows systems. Since 1997 Puckette has also been part of the Global Visual Music project with Mark Danks, Rand Steiger, and Vibeke Sorensen, which has been generously supported by a grant from the Intel Research Council.

Cite this record

"Miller Puckette." Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2011. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/miller-puckette.

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Summary

Miller Puckette earned a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT (1980) and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard (1986); he was a member of MIT's Media Lab until 1987 and then a researcher at IRCAM, where he wrote the Max program for MacIntosh computers (commercialized by Opcode Systems in 1990 and later available from Cycling74.com). In 1989 he developed Max/FTS for the ISPW (commercialized by Ariel) and his work was extended as jMax; he joined UCSD Music in 1994 and is Associate Director of CRCA, is developing Pure Data (Pd) for live performance (runs on Linux, IRIX, Windows), and since 1997 has participated in the Global Visual Music project with Mark Danks, Rand Steiger, and Vibeke Sorensen with support from the Intel Research Council.

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Last modified 18 June 2011

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