Skip to main content
Music Music
  1. HOME
  2. People
  3. Faculty
  4. Emeritus Faculty
  5. Miller Puckette

Miller Puckette

Computer Music

Miller Puckettempuckette@ucsd.edu

Website | Publications | Wikipedia 

Miller Puckette obtained a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT (1980) and Ph. D. in Mathematics from Harvard (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 (l'Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Musique/Acoustique), founded by composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. 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 professor. From 2000 to 2011 he was Associate Director of UCSD's Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA; now defunct).

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, and Kerry Hagan. 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.