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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.
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."
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....
[ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
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
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.
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.
... 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! :-)
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.