Communications of the ACM
Researchers Restore First-Ever Computer Music Recording Generated on Alan Turing's Computer
University of Canterbury researchers have restored the first recording of computer-generated music, created in 1951.
Credit: University of Manchester School of Computer Science
Researchers from the University of Canterbury (UC) in New Zealand have restored the first recording of computer-generated music, created in 1951 on a gigantic device created by Alan Turing.
The researchers say the recording, which laid the foundation for the development of synthesizers and modern electronica, shows that Turing was a musical innovator.
"Alan Turing's pioneering work in the late 1940s on transforming the computer into a musical instrument has been largely overlooked," they say.
When the researchers analyzed the 12-inch acetate disc containing the music, they found the audio was distorted. "The frequencies in the recording were not accurate," says Canterbury professor Jack Copeland. "The recording gave at best only a rough impression of how the computer sounded."
They fixed the recording by adjusting the speed of the audio, compensating for a "wobble" in the recording, and filtering out extraneous noise.
The recording, which was used to generate three melodies, was made 65 years ago by a BBC outside-broadcast unit at the Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester, U.K. Although Turing programmed the first musical notes into a computer, it was another computer scientist, Christopher Strachey, who was the first to string them together into tunes.
From Agence France-Presse
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