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Oldest Computer Music Unveiled
drewmoney writes with a cool story from the BBC, which says that "A scratchy recording of Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer generated music. The article also collects some other very interesting bits of computer history.
A recording of a song about sheep? Sounds to me like they might be trying to fleece the masses.
Except for that the clip isn't Baa Baa Black Sheep..
It reminds me of an album called IBM 1401, A User's Manual by Jóhann Jóhannsson. It is simple computer music generated 30 years ago that has been orchestrated.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
No the computer is in England it starts out with "God Save The Queen". Which is the original title of the music.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
What is the statue of limitations before the RIAA can no longer try to cash in on those early IP pirates?
Do I get a gold star now?
My blog
Oh no! The BBC is going to be sued by the RIAA! But wait... if the BBC is funded by all UK citizens... Wouldn't it mean that all UK citizens are supporting the piracy of this song... So in the RIAA's mind wouldn't it give them reason to sue the entire UK?!?!
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The recording also includes a rendition of 'God Save The King' at the beginning - didn't work, though, he died six months later aged 56.
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And I was expecting something like "Golden Axe" on a PC Speaker! I'm impressed!
STATUTE of limitations, watch some Seinfeld!
1951, so s/Queen/King/.
I imagine it's generated (DNRTFA), but it sounds a lot like a violin.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
No the computer is in England in November 1951 and starts out with "God Save The King." Which is the original title of the music.
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Are you sure the oldest computer music isn't just x=peek(-16636), or command+open apple+closed apple + reset?
stuff |
Just like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and The Alphabet song are the same.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
That's Audacited! no doubt about it ;)
I can't call that English
I just thank God there is now a MIDI File Organizer that can help me preserve my old midi's and sort them by name using a simple 22-digit ID number.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
you just blew my mind man.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
"If you wante to know if 2^127-1 is a prime number, you can get the machine to give you the answer in a matter of days, it takes a week to set it up and..."
:-)
That kind of thing always makes me smile. First off, how complicated the whole setup is to do this.
Honestly, this is just amazing to watch. Thanks for the link!
Oh, and I remember the first voice I ever heard from my computer. It was either a gold game ("Oh, got a hold of that one!" or Mach-3, a really cool racing game that would say it's name when you turned first started playing it... man, I miss that game
Who stole my key?
And "Baa Baa, Black Sheep"...
"Hello, I am Macintosh!"
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
At the time (autumn 1951), it would have been "God Save the King."
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
All sources point to this as the oldest computer music:
And here I thought my efforts of programming every note of Axel F (thanks to the band director who loaned me the score) into my Commodore 64 was the first computer music!
That computer had the Sex Pistols on it? Cool!
Not far off the mark considering that the House of Windsor changed their name from Wettin as a result of the First World War to seperate themselves from the German royal family.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
The world's oldest RIAA subpoena.
If you leave out all the notes, it is also John Cage's 4'33".
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
If the cake was a lie, how are we to trust the sheep? Are computers always hungry (Bender is the cook), or are pc musicians just poor starving bastards?
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus
P.S. My masters in London haven't allowed me to have a monarchy since 1246 (or 1415 if you count Owain Glyndwr). Can't say I've missed it much. Love the EU though, first time in 900 years the Welsh haven't been treated as second-class citizens....
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My father remembers as a schoolboy around then visiting the laboratory at Manchester, and asking how it made noises. IIRC he says they were actively loading the system clock and making it slow down or speed up depending on how much work it was doing driving circuit elements.
Wow, you know you're right, it had never occurred to me that the melody of "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" is the same as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" presumably chosen because of it's connotations with the original Edison Phonograph recording. And "god save the Queen" is still turning up in strange embedded processor music http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGEqlNU30Tg
it's = it is
its = belonging to it
Thanks to digital audio, I don't have to pay for music anymore!
Pa-dum-pum!
Last night I played a blank tape at full volume. The mime next door went nuts.
The pic in the article looks like an early screen shot of the first mod tracker program. Strike up another first for the British!
I thought they changed their name from "Saxe-Coburg-Gotha"?
it's = it is
its = belonging to it
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Yeah I'm not byting.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Not to split semantic hairs, and I absolutely feel these recordings are historically significant, but the earliest digital recordings are at least as old as the first player-piano rolls -- depending on how you constrain (or don't constrain) your recording technique semantics. Perhaps the recordings mentioned in this story are the oldest 'sampled' recordings, meaning recordings as 'listened to' by a computer, but every time I run a player-piano roll I'm listening to a (2-bit + modifier bits for sustain, etc) digital recording. Arguably, the mechanism that produced these recordings may be too mechanical, but recording (as well as playback today) even employed vaccum 'tubes' 8^). If you see my point here, then the music-box disks are even older, but those were manufactured manually, that is a craftsman made each of those bumps on the disk, so they aren't "recorded" and so I'd argue they aren't recordings. Again, depends on how you constrain, or don't constrain the definition on the process. One could also argue either of these are the first programs as they use a positional "programing" language, each position characterized by a 1 or 0 (bump or no pump), each with a unique mapping to a distinct audio function (distinguished by frequency). They both even employ a clock (each 'instruction' being locked to the last through a smallest unit of measured time, in this case known as tempo), - Steve
âoeThe wall between art and engineering exists only in our minds.â -- Theo Jansen
That was the 'family name' not the 'house name'.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
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No, the music played by the Ferranti Mark 1 and the CSIRAC were *NOT* sampled, but synthesised.
Piano rolls, as you mention, were sampled - although physically, not electronically.
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Someone jamming out with an abacus solo.
(later an inspiration for John Bonham)
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For those who aren't familiar with the alphabet song, here it is...
Most sources don't get the lyrics right, but this one I'm pretty sure is correct.
Bow-ties are cool.
Actually, I think the recording technique, at least later, was a specially equipped piano that used an electronic current to mark the roll whenever a key or pedal was pressed, and this was used as a stencil to produce copies. You're right, though, these would NOT be synthesized music, as is implied by the article.
âoeThe wall between art and engineering exists only in our minds.â -- Theo Jansen
Obviously, God wasn't listening to this new-fangled technology.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I once did the theme to Batman (the 1989 film) into QBasic on a PC... Had to chop it down to fit in three voices but it came out pretty decent as I recall...
Bow-ties are cool.
I noticed how they're the same... if that's what you mean.
Lets all sing together kids...
A-B-C-D-E-F-G
Twinkle Twinkle little star
H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P
How I wonder what you are
Q-R-S-T-U-V
Up above the world so high
W-X-Y-Z
Like a diamond in the sky
Now I know my A-B-C's
Twinkle Twinkle little star
Next time won't you sing with me.
How I wonder what you are.
If people can claim to be programmers after using punch cards, then the player piano counts as computer music.
God country tis F G, have you any wool...
Make it stop!
*W-X-Y-and-Z
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.
Q-R-S, T-U-V,
And one for the little boy who lives down the lane.
Now I know my A-B-Cs,
How I wonder what you are.
Nope, they sound the same to me. Sure, some parts are changed to shoehorn the different lyrics in there, but it's the same melody throughout.
Well, punch cards are a (digital) recording -- they're a line of computer code recorded to 'card' (and the recording is even done in *three* dimensions), and they're even read in to the system by a play-back mechanism (each with it's own 'timing' -- or at least they're played back in a specific order, hence each card being a three dimensional recording -- two dimensions for each character in the line of code, and it's place in the stack). 8^) I've never tried to run one through my player piano, but, sadly, I do remember people playing computer CDs in CD players.
âoeThe wall between art and engineering exists only in our minds.â -- Theo Jansen
Strictly speaking, the traditional tune for Baa Baa Black Sheep is the same as for The Alphabet Song. A number of years ago a friend of mine discovered that you can also sing it to the melody of Hatikvah.
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I recall Zuse claiming that they invented the computer because they has some machine that performed some operations sequentially according to holes punched into film strips (what was later to become paper tape). I always thought that under that definition a player piano is a computer, because it uses some kind of punch tape to make a machine well-defined things in pre-determined order.
If this counts, then there's been computer-generated music a lot earlier than the fifties.
Is there actually some kind of "commonly agreed upon definition" of the term computer? Does it have to be equivalent to a Turing machine? Does it have to produce output that itself can read as input? Was this machine of 1951 (which I know nothing about) in either of these categories?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Perhaps the first ANALOG performance -- no known recordings as far as I know....
Yes, and that means you could play a roll and get the same timing that the original piano player would've used. I have a couple of MIDI files that were made by scanning old piano rolls originally played in by Scott Joplin -- which is probably as close to a "live recording" of him playing as you're going to get...
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Back in the 70's, the school's computer jobs were submitted on punched cards and then you waited for your output to be printed on the big line printer. Most people would have to look at the header pages to see if it was their job, but some enterprising types noted that the line printer made a distinctive tone when it printed out all of a particular character. They took this further to print out their particular fanfare at the head of their job, so they could tell from across the room when their job was being printed.
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And just like how the "Hamster Dance" is the same song as "Whistle Stop" (from Disney's animated version of Robin Hood).
Now that you point it out, it is a bit precious to separate computer generated music from any other form of recorded music where the machine could be altered. The pianola is just following a spool of punched hole program.
It is interesting how something as alien as a computer gets embedded into our culture. It does seem like tools are almost a part of our mental approach. So I suspect making machine music goes way back. I've not been to Nepal, but I think monks in that region have prayer wheels driven by water that also tinkle away on pipes or some such. Probably don't have a manufacture date on them but an archeologist could probably say they are early Gong Dynasty or some such.
Anyone know if the Ancient Greeks had automated sound producers. (Not counting thunder generators. Drum rolls to announce gods don't count.)
Not to mention "Anacreon in Heaven" and "The Star Spangled Banner".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
First measure same melody:
Twinkle Twinkle
Baa Baa Black Sheep
Second measure different:
Little Star
Have you any wool?
Lets just speed this up:
3-6 same
7-8 different
And Baa Baa Black sheep ends, while Twinkle Twinkle goes on for another four measures.
When you're sticking songs with half an octave of range with no jumps of more than a third, and you're only doing major chords (because these things make it easy to learn them), you don't have a lot of options for the melody.
Things are going to sound the same. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to pick apart most rock songs as being repeats of other songs. (How many are Pachelbel's canon now? 15 or 20?)
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
The nice thing about it though was it served as an excellent diagnostic aid. When the full system was working properly it would make a very complex sound, a bit like a dishwasher or something, but when it hit a bug and hung you'd get a single tone (a bit like those "beep beep beeeeeeep" monitors in hospitals). And you could tell when things were starting to go wrong, a bit like listening to a car engine. Quite cool, I sometimes miss being able to "listen" to complex programs executing.
Daisy, Daisy,
give me your answer-do.
I'm half crazy
all for the love of you.
... that it was Christopher Strachey who wrote the music programs? That's the guy who invented CPL and he was also involved with BCPL, the ancestor of C. He wrote the book "BCPL - The Language and Its Compiler" together with Martin Richards. That book was my introduction into compiler design! :-)
Mp3s or it didn't happen.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Back in the day when we had band printers we would program the hammer banks to play tunes. Must have been around 1977 or 1978 or so. When the needle based printers came out we got even more tones out of them and we could play some really cool stuff. Since I worked for the printer manufacturer it was easy to make slight mods to the ROMS to make music even easier. None of that stuff ever shipped deliberately though. I've heard tales going back even farther that they could make drum memory sing.
Why bother
Check out the earliest recorded sounds of any kind.
What's truly mind-blowing about the phonautograph is that the inventor didn't even realize that the sounds he "recorded" could possibly be played back! 148 years later somebody wrote a computer program that transformed the machine's scribbling into an audible human voice.
Except that it's not the same
Twinkle twinkle little star: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JlbjpmBFljo
Baa Baa black sheep: http://youtube.com/watch?v=jn2KINx8Gaw
Try singing twinkle twinkle over the top of baa baa black sheep.
Different
Both Arthur and AW are right - the family name went from Saxe-Cobourg and Gotha to Windsor, likewise the house name from Wettin to Windsor. Meanwhile, Prince Phillip changed his name from Battenburg to Mountbatten (same meaning, just English). As a result, the HRH-styled descendants of Elizabeth II are Windsors, and all the others go by Mountbatten-Windsor.
First rule of trauma: Bleeding always stops.
Actualy us black sheep of the family don't get to use either the 'Mountbatten-Windsor' or the Moutbatten monickers.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
That every TRS-80 Model 1 L216K machine figured out at some point that placing an AM radio near the machine and running certain commands made it possible to play music.
And then if you played with a bit of Z80 machine language, you could modulate the cassette port.
How I loved that machine.
They had Sex Pistols recordings in 1951? Who knew...
Statue of Limitations? Is that some kind of wall or something?
No--it's what will replace the Statue of Liberty if the Democrats win another House majority.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
"1024 bits ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates
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Translation:
Dark Reflection
You mean, "Ah, vouz direz-je maman"?
It has a nice beat and you can dance to it.
Table-ized A.I.
Darling: Four verses! Four verses! I meant four verses! Look, I'm as British as Queen Victoria. Edmund: So your father's German, you're half German, and you married a German? Darling: (crying) No! No! Look, for God's sake, I'm not a German spy!!!
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Phenomenal!
I can whole-heartedly recommend the "The Gurus of Electronic Music" set: http://www.furious.com/PERFECT/ohm/ to anyone intrigued with early computer-generated and electronically-composed music.
Some fantastic recordings of early computerized speech in there (He Destroyed Her Image) along with some terrific compositions by Brian Eno, Terry Riley, and Clara Rockmore (lady Theremin virtuoso), as well as the theme from "Forbidden Planet", and other gems..
This is already mentioned in Alan Turing biography by Andrew Hodges, released in 1983.
Just like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and The Alphabet song are the same
Weird Al's parody of ABCDEFG, no doubt.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Looks more like a busy NetHack situation to me :P
Connection closed by foreign host.
given the date it's actually "God Save The King"
my goodness, it needs tuning. the E4 is way sharp
And (more to the point) Twinkle and Baa Baa Black Sheep are almost the same song.
I just realised that recently too!
The Illiac was the 4th computer ever built (modeled on the Eniac). Professors would mail in the jobs that they wanted to have run, and a computer operator would be there to run the machine 24x7. To catch buggy programs with infinite loop, the last bit of the output was routed through a speaker. As long as the operator would hear static, everything was fine, but if it started humming, then the program had hit an infinite loop.
One morning at 2am, the operator put in the next program on the file, sent in by one of the math professors on campus. It immediately began playing the school fight song!
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