Wayne Slawson

Wayne Slawson was born in Detroit in 1932. He studied mathematics and composition at the University of Michigan, receiving a BA in 1955 and an MA in 1959, and earned a PhD in psychoacoustics at Harvard University in 1965. Alongside his graduate work he was a computer programmer and systems analyst, serving in the U.S. Air Force from 1955 to 1957 and later working at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica and the Mitre Corporation in Bedford, where he specialized in speech synthesis. He held post-doctoral fellowships at MIT and at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm before beginning an academic career that spanned more than three decades. Slawson taught composition, music theory, and psychoacoustics at Yale University from 1967 to 1972, at the University of Pittsburgh from 1972 to 1986, and at the University of California from 1986 until his retirement in 2001, where he directed the Computer and Electronic Music Studio. After retiring from academia he moved to Oregon, where he founded the micro-publishing company Yank Gulch Music, lectured part-time at Southern Oregon University, and continued to compose.

Slawson’s early experiments in the 1960s placed him among the first composers to use digital computers as instruments. He wrote the programs MUSE and SYNTAL to implement a source–filter model of sound, where speech was understood as energy sources resonating through filters. This gave him a framework for controlling timbre with the same rigor as pitch, and made color a primary compositional resource. His piece Wishful Thinking About Winter, produced at MIT in 1967, set a haiku through spectral glides that reshaped vowels into music. He expanded this system in Sound Color, published in 1985, which codified “color classes” as the timbral equivalent of pitch classes, opening a new field for analysis and composition.

His contributions were recognized internationally, beginning with the inclusion of Wishful Thinking About Winter on the landmark Decca album Voice of the Computer in 1970, presented alongside works by Jean-Claude Risset, James Tenney, and other pioneers. Sound Color was awarded the first Outstanding Publication Award of the Society for Music Theory in 1986 and remained a touchstone in the field for decades. The ideas he advanced shaped a wide range of compositions that brought computer-generated sound into dialogue with traditional ensembles, from the orchestral Motions to string quartets and later works including Quatrains Miniatures, Mixed Doubles, Snow, and Winter Rounds, where spectral strands and instrumental voices were composed as parallel dimensions. As a teacher he influenced generations of students at Yale, Pittsburgh, and Davis, and in later years he continued to compose while directing Yank Gulch Music from his home in Oregon. Slawson passed away in 2022.