Milton Byron Babbitt (May 10, 1916 – January 29, 2011) was an American composer, music theorist, mathematician, and teacher.

[3] Babbitt was making his own arrangements of popular songs by age 7, "wrote a lot of pop tunes for school productions",[4] and won a local songwriting contest when he was 13.

[5] A Jackson newspaper called Babbitt a "whiz kid" and noted "that he had perfect pitch and could add up his family's grocery bills in his head.

He also emphasized the importance of composers pursuing composition in a research perspective rather than focusing on societal approval.

[11] In 1991, Babbitt said of the article's lasting notoriety, "For all that the true source of that offensively vulgar title has been revealed many times, in many ways, even—eventually—by the offending journal itself, I still am far more likely to be known as the author of 'Who Cares if You Listen?'

Philomel (1964), for example, is for soprano and a synthesized accompaniment (including the recorded and manipulated voice of Bethany Beardslee, for whom the piece was composed) stored on magnetic tape.

By the end of the 1970s, Babbitt was beginning his third creative period by shifting his focus away from electronic music, the genre that first gained for him public notice.