[1] Showing an early interest in music, after four years of initial study with local teachers he took private lessons in counterpoint, orchestration and composition with Darius Milhaud, who lived near the Smith family.

[4] Smith and Chowning, along with John Grey, Loren Rush and Andy Moorer, subsequently founded the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).

Reviewing Smith's Woodwind Trio in 1974, Richard Swift commented how '...the long arching lines of the Trio, the sensitive and refined shaping of short movements, the twentieth-century Franco-American sonorities of the instruments make a fitting act of homage to Milhaud, but the voice is always Smith's own...'.

[6] Reviewing the two motets in 1976, Swift commented that Smith's music 'commands attention by virtue of its imaginative and expressive power and intelligent craft.

'[7] Retiring from Stanford in 1992, Smith continued to develop SCORE and was an enthusiastic supporter of the local donkey sanctuary, until his death in Palo Alto, California, on December 17, 2013.