Max Mathews, often called the father of computer music, died Thursday in San Francisco. He was 84.

The cause was pneumonia, his son Vernon said.

Mathews wrote the first program to make it possible for a computer to synthesize sound and play it back. He also developed several generations of computer-music software and electronic instruments and devices.

He was an engineer at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., in 1957 when he wrote the first version of Music, a program that allowed an IBM 704 mainframe computer to play a 17-second composition of his own devising.

Because computers at the time were so slow, it would have taken an hour to synthesize the piece, so it had to be transferred to tape and then speeded up to the proper tempo. But the experiment proved that sound could be digitized, stored and retrieved.

“The timbres and notes were not inspiring,” Mathews told a conference on computer music at Indiana University in 1997, “but the technical breakthrough is still reverberating.”

At Bell, Mathews developed new generations of Music as well as Groove, the first computer system for live performance. Music V led to such current programs as Csound, Cmix and MAX, a visual-programming language for music and multimedia originally written in the 1980s and named for Mathews.

The implications of Mathews’ early research reached popular audiences through the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in which the HAL 9000 computer sings “Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two)” as its cognitive functions are dismantled.