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Oldest Computer Music Unveiled

Posted by timothy on from the except-for-accidental-john-cage-bits dept.

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.

8 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. As noted on Hack-A-Day... by 68030 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Except for that the clip isn't Baa Baa Black Sheep..

    1. Re:As noted on Hack-A-Day... by IronMagnus · · Score: 3, Informative

      LTFA (Listen to etc...) The first song starts out as "my country tis of thee" but ends with a lick from Baa Baa Black Sheep... so, though the description could have been better, the computer DOES play the song in question.

    2. Re:As noted on Hack-A-Day... by Farmer+Tim · · Score: 2, Informative

      In that case, you mean "Thought the description could have been Americanised". God Save the [$monarch] is England's national anthem, the article comes from the British Broadcasting Corporation, the people who built the computer and wrote the program were English. Not referring to the American re-write seems pretty reasonable and accurate to me.

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  2. Re:Wrong. by arthurpaliden · · Score: 4, Informative

    No the computer is in England it starts out with "God Save The Queen". Which is the original title of the music.

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  3. Re:Wrong. by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 4, Informative

    No the computer is in England it starts out with "God Save The Queen". Which is the original title of the music.
    Gee, I never noticed..."God Save the Queen" and "My Country Tis of Thee" are the same song!

    Do I get a gold star now?
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  4. Re:Wrong. by Myrddin+Wyllt · · Score: 5, Informative

    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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  5. Re:Wrong again by Kozar_The_Malignant · · Score: 3, Informative

    At the time (autumn 1951), it would have been "God Save the King."

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  6. Re:Sampled or generated? by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 2, Informative

    I imagine it's generated (DNRTFA), but it sounds a lot like a violin.

    Sounds like a motor, possibly from a tape reel or a cardpunch, to me.

    A loudspeaker, assuming anyone had been inspired to connect one to a computer's data bus back then, would likely have generated audible pitches by switching between logical 0 and 1 at various intervals -- a simple square wave, in other words. The timbre heard on the recording is more harmonically rich than that. In fact, it reminds me quite a lot of the sound of the Atari 2600's TIA sound generator.

    It's also noticeably limited in the number of frequencies it can generate -- many notes are painfully out of tune from the Western scale. Motors not generally being designed to produce specific pitches, this behavior seems consistent with a component being used for something other than its intended use.

    This is not the oldest known example of an electronic tone generator (by several decades), but may well be the first "sequencer" program for storing and reproducing musical events.