Why everyone who loves sound in videogames should mourn Max Matthews

The Times has a lovely obit written by Luke DuBois for Max Matthews, the arch-father of computer music:

When Max died in April at  the age of 84 he left a world where the idea  that computers make sound is  noncontroversial; even banal.  In 2011,  musicians make their recordings using digital audio workstations, and  perform with synthesizers, drum  machines and laptop computers. As  listeners, we tune in to digital broadcasts  from satellite radio or the  Internet, and as consumers, we download small  digital files of music  and experience them on portable music players that are,  in essence,  small computers. Sound recording, developed as a practical invention  by  Edison in the 1870s, was a technological revolution that forever  transformed  our relationship to music.

[…]

The history of music is the  history of technology.  Unless you are  improvising, a capella  outdoors with your own singing voice, you are  making music with technology, be  it the technology of writing,  architecture, instrument design, electric  amplification, electronic  reproduction, or digital synthesis.   Musicians intuit this, and can  easily weather massive shifts in how we  relate to new technologies in  the human experience because we integrate our  future seamlessly with  our past.  We understand that every human  culture will use the maximum  level of technology available to it to make  art.  It’s natural, and  everything Max gave us flows from that,  because he understood.  He was a  musician, too.