Barry Vercoe

New Zealand-born composer and computer scientist, longtime MIT Media Lab professor, who built Csound and the Synthetic Performer — early systems for real-time and score-following computer music synthesis — and helped shape the "rich atmosphere" of the MIT Experimental Music Studio in the early 1980s. Matters to this vault as Miller Puckette's teacher (1979–1987) and, in Puckette's own words, the "second, crucial influence" on Max's design, standing alongside Max Mathews's RTSKED as one of the two named technical ancestors Puckette credits in place of any academic dataflow-computation lineage (claim-puckette-max-origins-cite-no-dataflow-ancestor).

References

• claim-puckette-max-origins-cite-no-dataflow-ancestor
• observation-puckette-dataflow-claims-confirmed-bridge-not-false-friend
• Captures: 2026-08-12-did-labview-and-max-independently-invent-the-patch, 2026-08-14-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different