Max Mathews
The Bell Labs engineer (1926–2011) who got a computer to generate music in 1957 and is usually called the father of computer music.
Mathews' day job at Bell Labs was speech transmission, but in 1957 he wrote MUSIC I for an IBM 704 and had it compute a seventeen-second piece. It sounded thin, but the principle was new: sound as numbers, calculated from a description rather than played on an instrument. The programs that followed, the MUSIC-N family, set the template that audio languages still follow.
In 1961 his colleagues made an IBM 7094 sing Daisy Bell with Mathews' accompaniment. Arthur C. Clarke heard it and later borrowed it for HAL 9000's final minutes in 2001. Mathews went on to build the Radio Baton conducting controller, and Miller Puckette named Max/MSP after him.