题型:阅读理解 题类:常考题 难易度:普通
安徽省淮北市第一中学2017-2018学年高二上学期英语12月月考试卷
Max Vernon Mathews has been called the father of computer music. He created electronic tools so that people could use computers as musical instruments. He had a huge influence on the development of electronic music and how it is written, recorded and played.
In 1957, Max Mathews wrote the first computer program that enabled a computer to create sound and play it back. At the time, he was working as an engineer at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. His computer program was called Music. It enabled a large IBM computer to play a seventeen-second piece of music that he had written.
The computer was so slow that it would have taken an hour to play the piece of music in seventeen seconds. For that reason, Mathews moved the work to a tape player, which could be sped up to play the music at a normal speed. He later said that the sound quality of the music notes was not great, but the technical importance of the music was huge.
The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke visited Bell Laboratories in the 1960s. He heard a computer “sing” the song "Daisy Bell" on devices and programs developed by Max Mathews andother engineers. Clarke noted this technology in his book “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which was later made into a movie.
Mathews continued creating other versions of the Music program. He became interested in how computers could help musicians outside recording studios.
Max Mathews had a long and productive career. He worked with composers like John Cage and Edgard Varese. He helped create a center for research in computer music in Paris. And he taught at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in Stanford University in California.
Mathews believed modern musicians were not making full use of the power of computer music. He said a violin always sounds like a violin, but with a computer, the way a violin sounds is unlimited. He said he did not want computer sounds to replace live music. But he said he hoped laptop computers would one day be considered serious instruments
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