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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
The music probably killed him. But what would you expect from such a scratchy rendition? It's almost as bad as the Formula 1 car engine version.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
[ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
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.
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
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!
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.
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
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.
God country tis F G, have you any wool...
Make it stop!
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.
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! :-)
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.
"1024 bits ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates
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Translation:
Dark Reflection
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?
Looks more like a busy NetHack situation to me :P
Connection closed by foreign host.