The History of M

Why is it called M?

The first name of the program as it was being developed was "Master Composer" Then it was going to be called RMan, for "Random Manager."

Shortly before we released the first version, the four original authors met with Christopher Yavelow and Curtis Roads, well-known writers in the computer music field, to see if they could help us come up with a better name. We started noticing that all the things the program seemed to relate to began with the letter "m"--MIDI, Macintosh, music, "Maestro" so eventually Yavelow said, "Why don't you just call it M?" There is a well-known movie called "M" starring Peter Lorre, but it has nothing to do with the program. Nor does a band from the early 1980s called M that had a hit single called "Pop Muzik."

Another possible coincidence or conspiracy is the multimedia company "M Factory" based in northern California that had an expensive software product called Mtropolis. M was first released with another program called Jam Factory. Currently mfactory.com links to a software consulting firm with the beautiful name of Overhyped Technologies.

What is the story behind M?

The first version of M was written for the Apple Macintosh starting in 1986 at a small company started by Joel Chadabe based in Albany, New York called Intelligent Computer Music Systems, or Intelligent Music for short. The goal of the company was to develop an "intelligent musical instrument" that could take many forms, and M was the result of the exploration of a particular form that involved the manipulation of stored presets (called variables) using onscreen conducting gestures. It was designed to work with MIDI synthesizers. The authors were David Zicarelli, John Offenhartz, Antony Widoff, and Joel Chadabe. A preliminary version of M was released in late 1986 and version 2.0 in 1988. Version 2.0 was developed principally by David Zicarelli and contained an entirely new interface and many new features such as the Pattern Editor.

After the first version of M was released for the Macintosh, it was ported to other platforms. A version for the Atari ST was written by Eric Ameres. A version for the Commodore Amiga was written by Darien Fitzgerald that included an internal sampling synthesizer. Voyetra developed and marketed a version of M for the PC called M/pc.

Intelligent Music left the MIDI software business in early 1990. The Macintosh, Atari, and Amiga versions of M were taken over by Dr. T's Music Software. In 1994, Dr. T's stopped selling M, so the program has not been commercially available until EYES Co. Ltd. in Tokyo, Japan, contacted David Zicarelli in 1997 about reviving it, since they had a Japanese translation of the M manual and numerous customer requests for the program. EYES started selling M in September 1997.

There are several references if you want to learn more about theory and history of M. A recent book that everyone interested in electronic music and its history should read is Electric Sound by Joel Chadabe, one of the original authors of M and a pioneer of interactive composition. You can learn more about this book at the Electronic Music Foundation web site.

David Zicarelli wrote an article describing M and Jam Factory in Computer Music Journal when they were first published in 1987. There were also numerous magazine articles and reviews that cover M in Keyboard, Electronic Musician, Music Technology (UK), and Sound on Sound. Good luck finding them.

Have there been any more recent articles about M?

Yes, there was a review of M 2.5 in the February 1999 issue of Electronic Musician magazine. The article has not appeared on their on-line archives as far as we can tell.

So, what about those Atari, PC, and Amiga versions?

As far as we know, the Atari ST version still works, since, unlike the Macintosh, that OS has "stopped evolving." Tim's Atari MIDI World has a page devoted to Atari M. You never know, someone you know might keep an ST around to run M. We have no information about the Amiga version. Someone who has a strong interest in reviving a PC version of M contacted Voyetra and discovered that they no longer have the source code to M/pc, which should tell you how well the program sold on that platform.

What about the other Intelligent Music programs. Will they ever be revived?

A new version of OvalTune by David Zicarelli is currently in development. We are not aware of any other revival efforts at this time. A massive amount of effort was expended just to bring M up to date, so its future success may be an indication of whether it is worth the trouble to do anything else. It's also not clear that any of the authors of the Intelligent Music programs of the 1980s are very interested in revisiting their work from that time period (if they still have it around).

Another program I remember from that time period was Laurie Spiegel's Music Mouse. What's happened to that?

Here is Laurie Spiegel's web site where you can check out information on Music Mouse.

Did anyone I might have heard of use M?

Oh sure. However, we're a bit reluctant to name names, because it might implicitly constitute an endorsement. You'll need to do the research yourself.

There are some interesting rumors relating to the use of M on pop records. One producer who used it on a record by a well-known singer swore his friends to secrecy. Perhaps there was a certain embarrassment about using a program that operated on the principles of randomness and automated compositional techniques. It's interesting to speculate whether that same embarrassment would exist today, or whether the pop music world has increased its sophistication in relating with technology.

Are there any programs that influenced the development of M? Any programs available today that are similar?

There were a number of programs that could be called interactive algorithmic composition programs that appeared in the late 1980s that exhibited M-like features. Certainly the other Intelligent Music programs, such as Jam Factory, UpBeat, OvalTune, and RealTime, were influenced by M. Emile Tobenfeld developed some software for Dr. T's that he claimed were influenced in one way or another by M.

An indirect influence of M's abililty to modify an ongoing musical process while it is being played is the almost universal adoption of real-time editing in music sequencer programs. This is the ability to make changes to the underlying sequence data in a song without needing to stop or restart playback. However, one could also credit Intelligent Music's RealTime, which took this idea to an extreme, as a more direct influence in this area.

Many more traditional software applications today allow this type of editing while playing, so it doesn't really seem that distinctive anymore.
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