At Bell Laboratories, Matthews conducted research to improve the telecommunications quality for long-distance phone calls. Owing to long-distance and low-bandwidth, audio quality over phone calls across the United States was poor. Thus, Matthews devised a method in which sound was synthesized via computer on the distant end rather than transmitted. Matthews was an amateur violinist, and during a conversation with his superior, John Pierce at Bell Labs, Pierce posed the idea of synthesizing music through a computer since Matthews had already synthesized speech. Matthews agreed, and beginning in the 1950s wrote a series of programs known as MUSIC. MUSIC consisted of two files—and orchestra file containing data telling the computer how to synthesize sound—and a score file instructing the program what notes to play using the instruments defined in the orchestra file. Matthews wrote five iterations of MUSIC, calling them MUSIC I-V respectively. Subsequently, as the program was adapted and expanded as it was written to run on various platforms, its name changed to reflect its new changes. This series of programs became known as the MUSICn paradigm. The concept of the MUSIC now exists in the form of Csound.
