Newman Guttman

Newman Guttman was an American linguist and psychoacoustician whose research placed him at the dawn of computer music. Trained in linguistics and acoustics, he joined Bell Labs in the 1950s, where he conducted research on speech perception, pitch recognition, and auditory modeling. His investigations into how humans perceive tone and timbre led him to collaborate with Max Mathews and John R. Pierce on early experiments in digital sound synthesis. In 1957 he composed The Silver Scale using Mathews’s MUSIC I program on an IBM 704 computer, a short study that became the first piece of music digitally synthesized by a computer. Soon after, he created Pitch Variations, extending his psychoacoustic research through computer-controlled tones and frequency shifts.

At Bell Labs, Guttman helped shape the emerging field of psychoacoustics, contributing to foundational research on auditory processing and the physiology of hearing. His compositions were featured on the 1962 Decca album Music from Mathematics, the first public release of computer-generated music, which also included works by Mathews, Pierce, David Lewin, and James Tenney. Though he spent his career primarily as a scientist, Guttman’s authorship of The Silver Scale marked a pivotal moment in the history of sound synthesis, linking linguistic and acoustic research to the first artistic applications of digital computation. He passed away in 2018.