Born in
Wellington, New Zealand, Vercoe received undergraduate degrees in
music (1959) and
mathematics (1962) from the
University of Auckland before emigrating to the United States. While employed as an
assistant professor at the
Oberlin Conservatory of Music (1965–1967) and as the
Contemporary Music Project's
Seattle/
Tacoma composer-in-residence (1967–1968), he earned his
AMusD in composition from the
University of Michigan (where he studied with
Ross Lee Finney) in 1968. Prior to taking these positions, Vercoe supported his doctoral studies by working as a staff statistician at Michigan; it was in this capacity that first acquired an aptitude for computer programming by learning
MAD. In 1965, he married fellow composer and Michigan graduate student
Elizabeth Vercoe; they had two children before divorcing in the early 1990s. He married Kathryn Veda Vaughn in 1993. During a summer respite from his doctoral studies and a subsequent two-year
postdoctoral fellowship at
Princeton University under
Godfrey Winham, his research in
digital audio processing paved the way for the subsequent evolution of digital musical composition. From 1970 to 1971, he served as a visiting lecturer at the
Yale School of Music. In 1971, Vercoe became an assistant professor of humanities at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As one of the epoch's few specialists in digital synthesis, he speculated that he had indirectly been recruited by president
Jerome Wiesner through colleagues
John Harbison and
David Epstein because Wiesner harboured musical inclinations (having previously collaborated with
Alan Lomax) and sought to establish an
electronic music laboratory as an inevitable extension of the institution's mandate. After a two-year period in which Vercoe designed a real-time digital synthesizer, Wiesner and
Edward Fredkin personally procured a
PDP-11 for the fledgling research programme from
Digital Equipment Corporation in the summer of 1973, enabling him to abandon his previous methodology in favour of a streamlined, software-based approach. Shortly thereafter, the Experimental Music Studio was formed in laboratory space vacated by
Amar Bose. Following promotion to
associate professor in 1974, he joined the Lab for Computer Science as an associate member in 1977. He became a founding member of the
MIT Media Lab upon promotion to
full professor in 1984 and continued as
professor emeritus of music and media arts. For many years, he directed research in
machine listening and digital audio synthesis as head of the Lab's Music, Mind, and Machine group and served as associate academic head of its graduate programme in media arts and sciences from 2000 until his retirement in 2010. His notable students include
Susan Frykberg,
Miller Puckette and
Paris Smaragdis. Vercoe served as a consultant for the Boston Composers Project bibliography of Boston-area composers and compositions, first edition published in 1983. As of 2015, Vercoe resided in
Tauranga, New Zealand, where he co-founded and directed One Education, an offshoot of the
One Laptop per Child initiative. He was also an accomplished jazz musician. Vercoe died in Tauranga on 15 June 2025, at the age of 87. == See also ==