[Ron Capik[_3_]]

ChrisCoster's Theremin comment in another thread
reminded me of Max Mathews' "Radio Baton" and
in my search I encountered the sad news.
Max passed away April 21, 2011 at the age of 84.

I last saw Max at a Ball Labs research colloquium
well over a dozen years ago when he gave a talk on
harmonic theory focusing to his experiments with 13
note scale as well as demonstrating his "Radio Baton."
==
Here's a clip from his obituary:
Max Vernon Mathews was born on Nov. 13, 1926, in Columbus,
Neb. His parents taught at the state teachers’ college in
Peru, Neb.

After graduating from high school, he entered the Navy,
which trained him as a radio technician and set him on
his future course. He went on to study electrical engineering
at the California Institute of Technology, where he received
a bachelor’s degree in 1950, and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, where he earned a doctorate in 1954.

At Bell Labs, where his mentor was John R. Pierce, Mr. Mathews
collaborated with several scientists, as well as the composer
James Tenney, working on voice synthesis and computer music.
Early on, he saw the musical implications of Claude Shannon’s
work on converting analog information into digital form. His
optimism about the musical possibilities of digitized sound was
reflected in the title of an early paper, “The Digital Computer
as a Musical Instrument,” published in Science in 1963.

The implications of Mr. Mathews’s early research reached popular
audiences through the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in which
the HAL 9000 computer sings “Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two)”
as its cognitive functions are dismantled.
==

Later...
Ron Capik
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