There is something quite fascinating about listening to the recording of the first music played by a computer… especially when you consider that this recording is 65 years old!
Researchers at the University of Canterbury in England have managed to restore a 2-minute BBC recording of the first computer-generated music using a program developed by Alan Turing, the legendary British cryptologist known for his major role in breaking the Enigma machine code used by the Nazis to encrypt their communications during World War II.
Sometime between 1948 and 1951, Alan Turing led the design of one of the very first modern computers, the Mark I (and its successor, the Mark II). It was on this machine that he developed a program to generate a sound—a kind of click—that could be repeated quickly enough to create a note. By changing the order of the clicks, he was able to produce different musical notes. The result resembled something between a violin and a foghorn.
Turing was not a musician, but one of his acquaintances, Christopher Strachey, a schoolteacher and talented pianist who was allowed to work on the computer in his spare time, managed to program it to play various tunes, including the British national anthem, the God Save the Queen.
An original excerpt was recorded in 1951 at the BBC on a kind of vinyl record during a demonstration.
Jake Copeland, professor of art at the University of Canterbury, and Jason Long, musician and composer, found this recording, but unfortunately found that it was of very poor quality.
The frequencies in the recording were off: the recording only captured a rough idea of what the computer sounded like at best.
These frequency problems are explained by a problem with the recording speed, a problem regularly noted with the BBC's mobile recording equipment of the time.
Fortunately, they were able to gain access to the computer's manual, written by Alan Turing (Programmers' Handbook for Manchester Electronic Computer Mark II) which allowed them to recalculate all the audible frequencies that the Mark II computer could emit.
They were then able to identify the speed at which they needed to speed up the recording so that it reproduced the exact sound of the computer. At the same time, they took the opportunity to filter out all the unwanted noise in order to clean up the tape.
The result of this work can be heard below, and at the same time we hear the voices of people, probably BBC employees, joking about the quality of the music and the unexpected pauses of the system.
Finally, with his Floppotron, Paweł Zadrożniak only continued the musical work of Alan Turing, and probably without knowing it!
