Barry Vercoe

Barry Vercoe (1937 to 2025) was a New Zealand born American computer scientist and composer, best known as the inventor of Csound, a music synthesis language widely used by computer music composers. SAOL, the language underlying the MPEG-4 Structured Audio standard, is historically derived from Csound. He studied music and mathematics at the University of Auckland, then earned a doctorate in composition at the University of Michigan in 1968, where work as a staff statistician led him to learn programming. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971, built its Experimental Music Studio around a PDP-11 from 1973, and became a founding member of the MIT Media Lab in 1984, where he led research in machine listening and digital audio synthesis until retiring in 2010. He later co-founded One Education in Tauranga, New Zealand.