What is the story behind M?
The first version of M was written for the Apple Macintosh starting in 1986 at a small company started by Joel Chadabe based in Albany, New York called Intelligent Computer Music Systems, or Intelligent Music for short. The goal of the company was to develop an “intelligent musical instrument” that could take many forms, and M was the result of the exploration of a particular form that involved the manipulation of stored presets (called variables) using onscreen conducting gestures. It was designed to work with MIDI synthesizers. The authors were David Zicarelli, John Offenhartz, Antony Widoff, and Joel Chadabe. A preliminary version of M was released in late 1986 and version 2.0 in 1988. Version 2.0 was developed principally by David Zicarelli and contained an entirely new interface and many new features such as the Pattern Editor. After the first version of M was released for the Macintosh, it was ported to other platforms. A version for the Atari ST was written by Eric Ameres. A ver
