To: icma-post@umich.edu
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2025 13:58:02 -0400

It is with great sadness that I bring you the news of the passing of my dear friend and mentor, Barry Vercoe - the father of Csound.  

On Father’s Day, I received a call from his son, Scotty, who told me that he had passed.  

Although Barry’s health had been failing, I am happy to report that I was able to Zoom with Barry this past October, before the International Csound Conference in Vienna. I was able to share with him how Csound continues to live and grow and inspire: on the Web, on the Bela, on the Daisy, in the Qu-Bit Nebulae and Scanned Eurorack Modules, in VCV Rack, through the support for Live Coding, through the incredible Cabbage IDE, through the cool Puremagnetik plugins, in VR and XR via CsoundUnity and CsoundMeta, and especially Csound in the “Kia” EV6 car, (and the ‘Movement’ Csound-Cabbage synth https://worldwide.kia.com/int/sounds-in-nature/our-instrument that they designed and gave away with the car https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4egz2QiKzE), and in the cool hardware and software Csound-synth by “Coke” called Sound-Z (https://www.coca-cola.com/us/en/offerings/cokesoundz).  He was pretty excited!  

In the summer of 1979, I attended Barry’s Workshops in Computer Music at MIT and composed “Trapped in Convert.” While working on my PhD at UC San Diego with Dick Moore between 1981-85, Barry visited and installed “music11” on our PDP11 so that I could continue, secretly, composing and designing instruments and effects with his software, while focusing my research on Moore’s “cmusic” language.  When I returned to Boston in 1985, Barry invited me to work with him at MIT on his new Csound project, and it is there and then that our lifelong collaboration and deep friendship developed.  

I would meet him at 6 a.m. every morning, and we would leave at 6 p.m. every evening. I would spend the days testing his code and making sounds and instruments with all the new opcodes he was adding as he built upon his “music11” foundation and turned it into the mighty Csound.  I wrote a set of tutorials that Barry added to the manual. Over the years, we delivered papers, we gave demos, and we played concerts. We worked on The Csound Book.  We worked on the Analog Devices’ SHARCsound project (with Scotty Vercoe, Lee Ray, and John ffitch), and we worked on the $100 laptop project (One Laptop Per Child - OLPC), and so much more.  

I have so many wonderful memories and am so grateful for all the support and knowledge that Barry shared with me.  He built me the synthesizer of my dreams.  He built all of us the most amazing and inspiring instrument.  And he gave it away.  I can’t begin to thank him for all the gifts his work bestowed on me, my teaching, my career, and my musical life.  

I will end this note with one last story.  

Last week, I gave a keynote at the 50th International Computer Music Conference (ICMC2025).  A lot of it was about Max Mathews and Barry Vercoe and how their friendship was the spirit from which the field of computer music has blossomed.  In the middle of my keynote, I premiered a new work entitled “Csound Dreams in the MetaVerse.”  The piece features all of my instruments from “Trapped” (and many new ones too) that can now be hit, squeezed, stretched, and tossed about in immersive AI-generated 3D worlds.  Our “CsoundMeta” software, which brings the Csound language into the “Unity” game engine, allows me to jam and play with musicians locally and remotely - to bring players together from all over the world and play with them in my studio, or on the moon!  And so, playing with me live on stage were five alumni from Berklee, and we were joined remotely on stage by two alumni, one from Ohio (the CsoundMeta genius software developer, Strong Bear), and another from Paris, France.  As you might well imagine with any premier, especially in a new venue with limited setup and soundcheck time, there were a lot of technical (Wi-Fi router) issues. Things sort of worked, but just barely, and so we were all praying that the piece would not crash.  The visuals I was casting for the audience did lag a bit, but things seemed to be going smoothly.  Then, a few minutes before the very end of the piece, we all hear the sound of my Quest3 headset running out of power…. du..du..du..du..du…du… By some miracle, and I think I know now who was watching and listening from heaven, the system kept running and we made it to the end of the piece, an end that featured a beautiful lullaby, for Barry, that I was humming, and that Bethanie Liu, on acoustic recorder, was imitating. Both of our “voices” were shimmering in a heavenly landscape on another world.  When I told my students about Barry’s passing, one shared her belief with me that Barry was joining us from heaven, sharing my and his “Csound Dream.”  

先週、第50回国際コンピュータ音楽会議（ICMC2025）で基調講演を行いました。講演の大部分は、マックス・マシューズとバリー・ヴァーコーについて、そして彼らの友情がコンピュータ音楽という分野を開花させた精神であったことについてでした。基調講演の途中で、新作「Csound Dreams in the MetaVerse」を初公開しました。この作品には、「Trapped」で使用したすべての楽器（そして多くの新しい楽器も）が使用されており、AIが生成した没入型の3Dワールドで、叩いたり、握ったり、伸ばしたり、投げたりすることができます。Csound言語を「Unity」ゲームエンジンに組み込む当社のソフトウェア「CsoundMeta」により、ローカルでもリモートでも、ミュージシャンとジャムセッションや演奏を行うことができます。世界中からプレイヤーを集め、私のスタジオで、あるいは月で演奏するのです！というわけで、ライブステージで私と共演してくれたのはバークリーの卒業生5名。さらに、オハイオ州出身の卒業生2名（CsoundMetaの天才ソフトウェア開発者、Strong Bear氏）とフランスのパリ出身の卒業生2名がリモートでステージに加わりました。初演となると当然のことですが、特に新しい会場でセッティングやサウンドチェックの時間が限られていることもあり、Wi-Fiルーターなどの技術的な問題が山積みでした。なんとかうまくいきましたが、ギリギリで、演奏が止まらないようにと皆で祈っていました。観客に向けて流していた映像は少し遅延しましたが、全て順調に進んでいるように見えました。ところが、演奏終了の数分前、私のQuest3ヘッドセットの電池が切れる音が聞こえてきたのです…。ドゥ…ドゥ…ドゥ…ドゥ…ドゥ… 奇跡的に、そして今となっては誰が天国から見守り、聞いていたのか、私には分かる気がしますが、システムは作動を続け、私たちは曲の最後まで演奏することができました。曲の最後は、私がハミングし、ベサニー・リウがアコースティック・リコーダーで真似をした、バリーへの美しい子守唄でした。二人の「声」は、別世界の天国のような風景にきらめいていました。生徒たちにバリーの訃報を伝えると、一人の生徒が、バリーは天国から私たちのもとへ行き、私と彼の「Csound Dream」を共有していると信じていたと話してくれました。

I have always believed that music speaks to us, resonates in us, and connects us on a deeply spiritual level. Barry’s spirit lives in me and in all of us who use Csound, who contribute to Csound, and who continue to learn, discover, and create with Csound.  Barry, I miss you.  We all miss you.  And I hope that you knew, and now know, how grateful I am, and so many of us are, for this amazing gift that continues to teach and inspire all of us.

Dr. Richard Boulanger
Professor
Electronic Production and Design
Berklee College of Music