Miller Puckette

Thursday 19 October, 12:00 noon
Ca’ Giustinian, Venice

La Biennale di Venezia will present the Silver Lion to Miller Puckette.

In the motivation for the Silver Lion award, Lucia Ronchetti writes: “In recognising the work of Miller Puckette, the Biennale Musica pursues its path of attributing the award to figures on the contemporary music scene who, through their programming, performance and collaboration with composers, have enabled the creation of numerous masterworks during recent decades in the history of music. Max/Msp, created by Miller Puckette at the end of the 1980s, was conceived as an IT environment in which to perform live electronic music, control sound installations, create virtual musical instruments, process sounds in real time in instrumental performance, and generate digital sounds and compositions for computer; it has become one of the programmes most frequently used by composers and performers throughout the world and has influenced the compositional development of the electronic music and real-time sound processing of successive generations of composers. Pure Data allows musicians, visual artists, performers, researchers and programmers to create software by means of graphic patches and can be used to process and generate sounds, video, 2D/3D graphics, and to interface sensors, input devices and MIDI”.

Well-known as the author of The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music, the foundational text of the new audio culture, first published in 2007, Miller Puckette will be on stage at the Biennale Musica with the percussionist Irwin on October 18th at the Tese dei Soppalchi; he will also work as a tutor with the young artists selected for the Biennale College Musica.

Miller Puckette (1959, Chattanooga – USA) obtained a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts) in 1980 and Ph. D. in Mathematics from Harvard in 1986, winning an NSF graduate fellowship and the Putnam Prize Scholarship. He was a member of MIT's Media Lab from its inception until 1987, and then a researcher at IRCAM in Paris. At IRCAM he wrote Max, a widely used computer music software environment, released commercially in 1990 and now available from Cycling74.com.

Puckette joined the music department of the University of California San Diego in 1994, where he is now Distinguished Professor, emeritus.

He is currently developing Pure Data ("Pd"), an open-source real-time multimedia arts programming environment. Puckette has collaborated with many artists and musicians, including Philippe Manoury (whose Sonus ex Machina cycle was the first major work to use Max), Rand Steiger, Vibeke Sorensen, Juliana Snapper, Kerry Hagan, and Irwin. Since 2004 he has performed with the Convolution Brothers. He has received honorary degrees from Université de Mons and Bath Spa University and the 2008 SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award.