Dumour: Tell us about your musical background.

Roberts: I went to music school in New York City, where I was born and brought up. At the age of 15, after taking piano lessons from miscellaneous private instructors for nine years, I finally reached a place where I learned something, a school that is now known as the Manhattan School of Music. I started there in 1927, stayed there until 1933, when I graduated with a diploma in piano. That's also where I met my wife, Janice. I had several piano teachers, the last and most important of which was Rudolph Gruen. Of course, I had all sorts of classes in ensemble playing, theory, and counterpoint. I studied composition under Hugh Ross and Quincy Porter.

The same year I also received my master's degree in physics from Columbia University. At that point it became necessary to decide about my future career. Was I going to be a musician or a physicist? I decided that professionally I'd better be a physicist. I was a moderately good pianist, but not really good enough for the concert stage. It looked as if I would have to resort to teaching piano. Physics sounded like more fun that that, and I think it has been. One of the strongest arguments for going into physics was that I could still keep up with music as a physicist, but I couldn't keep up with physics as a musician. Ever since then, I've been a composer.

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Dumour: How was your musical work viewed by your colleagues at the Argonne National Laboratories?

Roberts: Usually you'll find among scientists a great number of people who are very fond of classical music. I had lots of sympathy and admiration. The man who was in charge of scientific films at Argonne, George Treseel, asked me to write computer music for his films. So I did that. I wrote the title music for a short film called Link that had to do with the analysis of bubble chamber photographs. He then asked me to write the music for the full-length feature film they were doing called The Many Faces of Argonne, which I wrote for conventional instruments; it was recorded by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. That film won an award later that year at a film festival in Belgium.

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Dumour: One of the most difficult pieces of equipment to find in the early days was a digital-to-analog converter.

Roberts: Yes, they were rare and expensive; an 8-bit DAC cost several thousand dollars...

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Dumour: Much of your music has a humorous edge.

Roberts: Yes, especially the songs. I've written about a hundred of them, mostly about physics. One the more popular ones is called Take Away Your Billion Dollars. It was written after World War II when the government was trying to entice physicists to accept large amounts of money to build big laboratories as a result of the success of the atomic bomb project. Many of us were not sure this was a good idea...