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Oldest Computer Music Unveiled

Posted by timothy on Wed Jun 18, 2008 01:00 PM
from the except-for-accidental-john-cage-bits dept.
Media Music Technology
drewmoney writes with a cool story from the BBC, which says that "A scratchy recording of Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer generated music. The article also collects some other very interesting bits of computer history.
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Submission: Oldest computer music unveiled by drewmoney (1133487)
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  • Could be a fake. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 18 2008, @01:03PM (#23842359)
    A recording of a song about sheep? Sounds to me like they might be trying to fleece the masses.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      A recording of a song about sheep?
      It sounds believable to me. The complexity of the song is completely similar with the latest trance/house/minimal music that fills stadiums in Europe.

    • Re:Could be a fake. (Score:5, Funny)

      by JustOK (667959) on Wednesday June 18 2008, @01:25PM (#23842727) Journal
      At least it didn't involve a goat in C#

    • Following one aborted attempt, a laughing presenter says: "The machine's obviously not in the mood."
      Clearly. The machine realised that the presenter was the worlds first digital music pirate. And to make matters worse, he was laughing like this:

      Yarrrrrrr!

  • As noted on Hack-A-Day... (Score:3, Informative)

    by 68030 (215387) on Wednesday June 18 2008, @01:04PM (#23842367) Homepage
    Except for that the clip isn't Baa Baa Black Sheep..

  • IBM 1401, A User's Manual (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lobiusmoop (305328) on Wednesday June 18 2008, @01:11PM (#23842473) Homepage
    It reminds me of an album called IBM 1401, A User's Manual [ausersmanual.com] by Jóhann Jóhannsson. It is simple computer music generated 30 years ago that has been orchestrated.

  • Sue Them? (Score:5, Funny)

    by PawNtheSandman (1238854) on Wednesday June 18 2008, @01:12PM (#23842491)
    What is the statue of limitations before the RIAA can no longer try to cash in on those early IP pirates?
  • Oh no! The BBC is going to be sued by the RIAA! But wait... if the BBC is funded by all UK citizens... Wouldn't it mean that all UK citizens are supporting the piracy of this song... So in the RIAA's mind wouldn't it give them reason to sue the entire UK?!?!
  • I imagine it's generated (DNRTFA), but it sounds a lot like a violin.
    • I imagine it's generated (DNRTFA), but it sounds a lot like a violin.

      I'm guessing you haven't heard too many violins in your life if that's what you think they sound like...

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by poot_rootbeer (188613)
      I imagine it's generated (DNRTFA), but it sounds a lot like a violin.

      Sounds like a motor, possibly from a tape reel or a cardpunch, to me.

      A loudspeaker, assuming anyone had been inspired to connect one to a computer's data bus back then, would likely have generated audible pitches by switching between logical 0 and 1 at various intervals -- a simple square wave [wikipedia.org], in other words. The timbre heard on the recording is more harmonically rich than that. In fact, it reminds me quite a lot of the sound of the Ata
  • Are you sure the oldest computer music isn't just x=peek(-16636), or command+open apple+closed apple + reset?

  • One day my MIDI's will be historic too (Score:3, Funny)

    by elrous0 (869638) * on Wednesday June 18 2008, @01:34PM (#23842861)
    I just thank God there is now a MIDI File Organizer [milkandcookies.com] that can help me preserve my old midi's and sort them by name using a simple 22-digit ID number.
    • Only 22 digits? I swear in the pre-mp3 days I had more than that many midi tracks sitting around on my computer.

  • Lies (Score:4, Funny)

    by pengudeus (1017112) on Wednesday June 18 2008, @01:54PM (#23843157)
    All sources point to this [youtube.com] as the oldest computer music:

  • Axel F, by Stewbacca (Score:3, Funny)

    by stewbacca (1033764) on Wednesday June 18 2008, @01:56PM (#23843183)
    And here I thought my efforts of programming every note of Axel F (thanks to the band director who loaned me the score) into my Commodore 64 was the first computer music!

  • Also included: (Score:5, Funny)

    by teneighty (671401) on Wednesday June 18 2008, @02:07PM (#23843329)
    The world's oldest RIAA subpoena.

  • How it was done ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SteveAstro (209000) on Wednesday June 18 2008, @02:17PM (#23843469)
    My father remembers as a schoolboy around then visiting the laboratory at Manchester, and asking how it made noises. IIRC he says they were actively loading the system clock and making it slow down or speed up depending on how much work it was doing driving circuit elements.

    • Re:How it was done ? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by techno-vampire (666512) on Wednesday June 18 2008, @03:24PM (#23844651) Homepage
      Back in the late '60s, I did some work on the late, lamented IBM 1620. It had a clock-tick of 20 ms (That's milliseconds, not micro.) and somebody found out that different instructions generated different RF signals. If you put a transistor radio (remember them?) on the console, you could listen to them. There was a program that would take a set of notes and durations and generate a "program" that ran the appropriate instructions to "play" the tune, rather like a rather odd compiler.

  • Using a speaker to debug programs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dgriff (1263092) on Wednesday June 18 2008, @04:20PM (#23845619)
    The first computer I ever programmed back in the seventies was a Marconi Myriad and had a built-in speaker. The speaker made a different noise according to (I think) what instruction was being processed (or maybe the tone was based on the memory address?). But anyway, there were lots of paper tapes around with programs that would do various loops to play tunes, eg classical organ pieces.


    The nice thing about it though was it served as an excellent diagnostic aid. When the full system was working properly it would make a very complex sound, a bit like a dishwasher or something, but when it hit a bug and hung you'd get a single tone (a bit like those "beep beep beeeeeeep" monitors in hospitals). And you could tell when things were starting to go wrong, a bit like listening to a car engine. Quite cool, I sometimes miss being able to "listen" to complex programs executing.

  • Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)

    by sexconker (1179573) on Wednesday June 18 2008, @04:25PM (#23845677)
    Daisy, Daisy,
    give me your answer-do.
    I'm half crazy
    all for the love of you.

  • Did anyone notice ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by flnca (1022891) on Wednesday June 18 2008, @04:51PM (#23846061) Journal
    ... that it was Christopher Strachey [wikipedia.org] who wrote the music programs? That's the guy who invented CPL [wikipedia.org] and he was also involved with BCPL [wikipedia.org], the ancestor of C [wikipedia.org]. He wrote the book "BCPL - The Language and Its Compiler" together with Martin Richards [wikipedia.org]. That book was my introduction into compiler design! :-)

  • Oldest Recording of ANY Kind (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nuckfuts (690967) on Wednesday June 18 2008, @06:12PM (#23847123)

    Check out the earliest recorded sounds of any kind [firstsounds.org].

    What's truly mind-blowing about the phonautograph [wikipedia.org] is that the inventor didn't even realize that the sounds he "recorded" could possibly be played back! 148 years later somebody wrote a computer program that transformed the machine's scribbling into an audible human voice.

  • 1024 bits? (Score:4, Funny)

    by unassimilatible (225662) on Wednesday June 18 2008, @09:10PM (#23849199) Journal
    The memory was built from a Cathode Ray Tube and allowed scientists to program 1024 bits

    "1024 bits ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by jd (1658)
      The music probably killed him. But what would you expect from such a scratchy rendition? It's almost as bad as the Formula 1 car engine version.

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