An Inclusive History of Computer Music

I was a graduate student in music and had four years of financial aid, two years towards the master’s and two years towards the doctorate. During my first two years of graduate study at Princeton, 1989-90 and 1990-91, I composed “Autumn Cove, Spring Night,” a computer music composition with signal processing algorithms applied to Chinese poetry and Chinese musical instruments. This composition was accepted as a paper and as a concert piece at the International Computer Music Conference in Hong Kong in 1993 and Japan in 1996. It was also performed in the Netherlands and Massachusetts. 

I came to the program with a master’s degree in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology and all of the music major courses for credit as a non-degree student at the University of California, Berkeley. I was bullied by other students in this program and went in another music direction at Princeton, and that shouldn’t have happened. However, I had a career in speech and audio signal processing in private industry, primarily AT&T Labs, and taught part time at four community colleges in New Jersey. My years of hard work and achievement and dedication should not be erased by being left out of this history. In addition, an undergraduate student who is Black spent many hours in the studio producing R&B music, and the history of his work in electronic music at Princeton is also excluded. I wrote to the author about these issues and the problem wasn’t resolved. I am presenting this history here and still hope that the authors here will foster an environment of inclusion and include my work and that of the Black student.