This Computer Played The World's First Digital Music in 1951
Posted by Joshua_Kopstein on Wednesday, Sep 29, 2010
It might sound like R2-D2 having a temper tantrum, but the melody you hear in the video above was the very first music ever generated on a computer. That’s right — Before software or MIDI or even microchip-based synthesis, this fuzzy collection of beeps, squeezed out from the innards of Australia’s CSIRAC Mk 1 computer in 1951, signaled the genesis of digital music as we know it. But without any of the modern conveniences of engineering or data preservation, programming and making audible the rawest, most primitive form of computer-generated sound was no easy task.
Without any interface with which to manipulate the sounds, the tones were generated by sending raw pulses of data through the machine, leaving engineers to manually program the length, frequency and pitch of each and every note onto large reels of tape. The process was so complex and laborious that only two of the its top programmers were skillful enough to compose music for the machine. And since CSIRAC predated any substantial understanding of digital audio (playback required a digital to analog conversion), an amplified speaker had to be crudely fashioned to the computer in order for any of the tones to be heard as they played back in real time.
Naturally, this didn’t allow any way of recording the machine’s sounds either, and therefore the tones will never be heard exactly as they originally sounded. The video above contains the world’s most faithful reconstruction of CSIRAC’s waveforms, engineered by highly trained operators with a margin of error less than one percent. But with the exception of the those that heard it live during its debut and various other demonstrations throughout the 1950’s, no one will ever hear CSIRAC’s true singing voice.
The legendary machine, now over half a century old, also holds the honor of being the only surviving first-generation computer in the world. It’s currently on display at the University of Melbourne’s computer museum.
[Tip of the hat to my Aussie ally cTrix, who is an inexhaustible font of knowledge on these topics]
About the author
Electronic musician and computer culture journalist. Contact: josh ◢at◣ motherboard ◐dot◑ tv
