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."
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...
thanks BoxRec, thanks slashdot
how else would I get those news ?
Inspiring, wonderful, thank you again
... they didn't hide it as deeply as the bloggers did with the link in the article.
It was a speaker. From the last link in the summary:
"The Manchester computer had a special instruction that caused the loudspeaker—Turing called it the 'hooter'—to emit a short pulse of sound, lasting a tiny fraction of a second. Turing said this sounded like 'something between a tap, a click, and a thump'. Executing the instruction over and over again resulted in this 'click' being produced repeatedly, on every fourth tick of the computer's internal clock: tick tick tick click, tick tick tick click. Repeating the instruction enough times like this caused the human ear to hear not discrete clicks but a steady note, in fact the note C6, two octaves above middle C."
Reading's real hard, I know, but give it a try sometime.
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.
It's saying I need Flash to play this. Really does seem like 1951.
Trolling is a art,
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.
http://blogs.bl.uk/files/first-recorded-computer-music---copeland-long-restoration.mp3
The song would have been God save the King at the time, interesting to think that's how long ago it was made.
The stupid part is the BBC doesn't use Flash for mobile devices. They don't need Flash on the desktop either.
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.