Driving force behind laptop for each child

Barry Vercoe is credited with training a generation of young composers in computer sound manipulation.

Barry Vercoe retired in 2010 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as head of the prestigious MIT Media Lab's music, mind and machinery group, and relocated to be nearer to family and friends in the Bay of Plenty.

Since then, Wellington-born Mr Vercoe has been putting his experience as one of the world's leading technology innovators to use in helping spread the One Laptop Per Child project, which he helped found, throughout Australasia.

"I've settled in Tauranga because I have an aunt there who helped raise me," said Mr Vercoe. "She just turned 100, so I was very happy to throw a big party for her with the family."

Most of Mr Vercoe's career has been spent in the US and he was a founding member of the MIT Media Lab when it was established in 1985. His students at MIT have created a string of digital audio innovations, which have been commercialised by numerous companies in the US and Japan. In 2006, Mr Vercoe was the first investor in The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company founded by two of his MIT students, which was wholly acquired by Spotify in 2014 as its music intelligence engine.

Mr Vercoe is credited by MIT with training a generation of young composers in computer sound manipulation, and pioneered the creation of synthetic music with the development of the Csound software-synthesis language. His group at the lab developed Csound into structured audio technology capable of delivering the complex, high-quality digital sounds quickly and at lower bandwidths without losing quality.

The technology was incorporated into MPEG-4, the world's first international standard for sound synthesis.

"When I went to university, I took two degrees - one in music and one in mathematics," said Mr Vercoe, who went on to do a PhD in music composition at the University of Michigan.

"They didn't overlap at the time. But later on when I came to the US I found there was a new field, which I helped establish, in computer music. It was a combination of the two things. That allowed me to bring together the two sides of my life."

Initially in the US he served as composer-in-residence for the Seattle-Tacoma public school system. In 1968 at Princeton he did pioneering work in the field of Digital Audio Processing, then taught briefly at Yale before joining the MIT faculty in 1971, where he remains a professor emeritus.

In the 1970s and 1980s he pioneered the composition of works combining computers and live instruments, then on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Paris developed a Synthetic Performer - a computer that could listen to other performers and play its own part in musical sync.

Mr Vercoe's current focus is as a co-founder and director of One Education, formerly known as One Laptop Per Child Australia, which has distributed more than 50,000 XO educational computers to remote schools in Australia and New Zealand. The concept arose out of a project he originally worked on with his colleagues at MIT.

"We began to consider how we could put technology into schools in an inexpensive way and create something intended for children, not as a business proposition," he said.

"It really started with some of us going to far off corners of the Earth, including Africa and the Pacific, looking at the problems of children who were being disadvantaged because they didn't have access to modern learning and technology."

The group designed a new computer which could be made in China, and supplied at half the cost of commercial products.

One Education has separated itself from the original US One Laptop Per Child project to pursue a new direction. Mr Vercoe said One Education was developing a new modular laptop, called Infinity, which will be available in schools early next year.

"We're designing a new machine of components that kids will be able to put together themselves," he said.

Mr Vercoe said most of the traction with the earlier XO laptop had been achieved in remote parts of Australia, with strong support in New Zealand.

Barry Vercoe
* Role: Co-founder / director, One Education; Co-founder One Laptop Per Child; Professor emeritus, MIT Media Lab, Boston
* Born: Wellington, New Zealand
* Age: 77
* Awards: Computer World / Smithsonian Award in Media Arts and Entertainment (1992), the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award (2004), the World Academy of Science Distinguished Achievement Award (2006).