Composer and data scientist Donald Alvin Byrd died on 22 October 2024 at the age of 78. Born 4 September 1946 in Chicago, Illinois, Byrd studied music composition at Indiana University and earned a PhD in computer science, supervised by Douglas Hofstadter. Byrd used his System for Music Transcription (SMUT) software from his dissertation work to create the music notation examples in Hofstadter's seminal book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Byrd's seminal work in computerized music notation continued at Princeton University and as the principal designer for the music notation program Nightingale. Byrd also worked in information retrieval in text and music, focusing on visualization and human.computer interaction, and he co-founded the International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) in 2000, with funding from the National Science Foundation. Byrd's legacy was honored in a special session during the 25th...