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Marc Canter emerged in the 1980s as an amalgamation
of opera singer, rock musician, software programmer, and entrepreneur.
He launched his software company, Macromind (now Macromedia)
in 1984, when the graphical user interface and its potential
for hypermedia applications became widely available. His first
product, SoundWorks, introduced multimedia production
to the personal computer. In 1988 Canter released the now ubiquitous
Director. By the close of the decade, desktop multimedia
grew into a global phenomenon, with Canter at the center of
the excitement, transforming the studios of artists, architects
and designers, reinventing the classroom, and altering the business
plans of executives from Silicon Valley to Singapore.
At the core of his approach was a notational system
that looks quite similar to a musical score, an intuitive format
that could be used easily by the artist. Canter saw the digital
artist of the future as a "composer" of all forms of media,
orchestrating fragments of graphics, animation, text, and sound,
into a single artwork. His predisposition towards theater and
music belies Canter's roots in live performance, and reinforces
his vision that desktop multimedia would evolve into the digital
Gesamtkunstwerk.
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