Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Restore the First Recording of Computer-Generated Music (bbc.co.uk)
BoxRec writes: Alan Turing was part of a team who created the earliest known recording of music produced by a computer. It starts with a few bars of God Save the Queen, a snippet of Baa Baa Black Sheep and then Glenn Miller's swing hit In The Mood. The recording was captured by the BBC in the Autumn of 1951 on a 12-inch (30.5cm) acetate disc. But when Professor Jack Copeland of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch and composer Jason Long discovered the disc, the audio on the disc had been distorted. In a blog post for the British Library, Copeland and Long said it "gave at best only a rough impression of how the computer sounded." BBC News reports: "By analyzing the recording, Copeland and Long realized it was playing at the wrong speed, possibly as a result of the recorder's turntable running too quickly as the acetate was cut. As they knew the notes the computer was actually capable of playing, the pair were able to calculate exactly by how much the recording needed to be speeded up in order to exactly match the sound made by the Ferranti Mark 1. They also removed extraneous noise from the recording -- though not the engineer's voice. 'It was a beautiful moment when we first heard the true sound of Turing's computer,' Copeland and Long wrote. Now anyone can hear it in all its somewhat ramshackle glory."
It sounds flaming homosexually gay.
She sounds like she's enjoying herself. and has a lovely voice. Who says woman are kept out of computing by men? They were some of the early pioneers.
I was expecting a simple sine wave or harsh square wave sound, but the sound is surprisingly pleasant. It sounds like someone practising the cello.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I have fist post
thanks BoxRec, thanks slashdot
how else would I get those news ?
Inspiring, wonderful, thank you again
Apparently that article was written back when it was still acceptable to require the Flash plugin in order to play audio or video on a web page.
Only LUDDITES care about LUDDITE computer-generated LUDDITE music. Modern app appers only listen to appy app music!
Apps!
... they didn't hide it as deeply as the bloggers did with the link in the article.
Welcome to 1984. It is here now. (Read the book to get the reference.)
"... because we have always been at war with Eurasia." The "media" are certain of it.
It has that sort of sound quality you hear from people trying to recreate the Imperial March using floppy disk drives or printer carriages. Does anyone know what they were using for an actual sound output device? Was it a speaker or something else? Maybe like the floppy drive players it was something mechanical the computer could control that was being repurposed?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Interesting how out of tune many of the notes sound. I wonder if that's due to not having fine enough control over the oscillator or because the programmer didn't understand tempering?
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Flash is required for this. Oh, the irony.
About 6 seconds in you can hear Turing say "Nice cock" to one of the other scientists. Unfortunately we don't know to whom he was speaking.
It's saying I need Flash to play this. Really does seem like 1951.
Trolling is a art,
Glenn Miller's "In The Mood" was the greatest song performed by a big band. It's also one of my all-time favorites. Glenn Miller, RIP.
Saying women can't code is being disingenuous. They are not productive coders. Now try the same trick your buddy pulled in school in the real world. The women wilt in competitive environments except for a small minority of whom most can be diagnosed with psychological disorders. These disorders ultimately cause discord in a team environment that keeps human resources very busy. The ones who can't compete will create drama that destroys team cohesion and morale.
Men and women are fundamentally different. Every work environment that gains a significant proportion of women has to change its practices to accommodate women because of this inability to compete effectively. Even in the effing Army, the presence of women is debilitating - literally filing EEO complaints against each other because of petty jealousies. Keeping women out of combat units had some utilitarian benefits, but primarily it was a mechanism for maintaining unit cohesion and morale.
If I were running a startup, with all the requirement for minimum expenditure and maximum productivity, I would hire all men until compelled by litigation to do otherwise, then hire women for job functions requiring minimum contact with the core competency of the firm, thereby _reducing_ my exposure to litigation and maintaining employee morale. Based on what I see out there, the people running startups appear to agree with me.
The song would have been God save the King at the time, interesting to think that's how long ago it was made.
You came so quickly, that you got first post.
You need to calm your hormones.
...that straight people are bigoted because they (men) won't take a dick up their ass or women won't lick other women. That's how warped their thinking is
It is the specific combination of fundamental + harmonics that determine the final waveform.
It occurs to me that in order to restore this recording they needed to read the notes of several people. How much of today's content is "on the web" that will be lost? Blog posts on a platform that is being retired and shutdown.
Makes me think those printers that "print the web," the ones we scoffed at, might actually make sense.
Another golden oldie that inspired Kubrick when he filmed the HAL9000 "lobotomy" scene in 2001.
So they turned the speed control until it was in tune? This is a newsworthy brilliant technological achievement?
Transcription disks are coated in lacquer. The author might as well have called it a wax disk if he was trying to pass on false information.
Valves always have and always will sound superior to transistors when it comes to reproducing or creating music.