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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.

5 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. IBM 1401, A User's Manual by lobiusmoop · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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  2. How it was done ? by SteveAstro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:How it was done ? by techno-vampire · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Back in the late '60s, I did some work on the late, lamented IBM 1620. It had a clock-tick of 20 ms (That's milliseconds, not micro.) and somebody found out that different instructions generated different RF signals. If you put a transistor radio (remember them?) on the console, you could listen to them. There was a program that would take a set of notes and durations and generate a "program" that ran the appropriate instructions to "play" the tune, rather like a rather odd compiler.

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  3. Using a speaker to debug programs by dgriff · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The first computer I ever programmed back in the seventies was a Marconi Myriad and had a built-in speaker. The speaker made a different noise according to (I think) what instruction was being processed (or maybe the tone was based on the memory address?). But anyway, there were lots of paper tapes around with programs that would do various loops to play tunes, eg classical organ pieces.


    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.

  4. Did anyone notice ... by flnca · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... 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! :-)