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Music Media Technology

Oldest Computer Music Unveiled 157

Posted by timothy from the except-for-accidental-john-cage-bits dept.
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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Oldest Computer Music Unveiled More

Oldest Computer Music Unveiled

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  • Could be a fake. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:03PM (#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 @02:25PM (#23842727) Journal
      At least it didn't involve a goat in C#

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by dintech ( 998802 )

      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 @02:04PM (#23842367) Homepage
    Except for that the clip isn't Baa Baa Black Sheep..

    • Re:As noted on Hack-A-Day... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Daimanta ( 1140543 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:06PM (#23842407) Journal
      This is Slashdot, begone with logic and truth!
    • No kidding. You think they're gonna hafta pony up for using "Happy Birthday"?

    • Re:As noted on Hack-A-Day... (Score:4, Informative)

      by IronMagnus ( 777535 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:09PM (#23842435)
      LTFA (Listen to etc...) The first song starts out as "my country tis of thee" but ends with a lick from Baa Baa Black Sheep... so, though the description could have been better, the computer DOES play the song in question.

      • Re:Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)

        by arthurpaliden ( 939626 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:12PM (#23842485)
        No the computer is in England it starts out with "God Save The Queen". Which is the original title of the music.

        • Re:Wrong. (Score:4, Informative)

          by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) * on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:15PM (#23842551) Homepage Journal

          No the computer is in England it starts out with "God Save The Queen". Which is the original title of the music.
          Gee, I never noticed..."God Save the Queen" and "My Country Tis of Thee" are the same song!

          Do I get a gold star now?

          • Re:Wrong. (Score:5, Funny)

            by Ucklak ( 755284 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:29PM (#23842797)
            Just like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and The Alphabet song are the same.

            • Re:Wrong. (Score:5, Funny)

              by k_187 ( 61692 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:38PM (#23842913) Journal
              you just blew my mind man.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by BobNET ( 119675 )

              Just like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and The Alphabet song are the same.

              And "Baa Baa, Black Sheep"...

              • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

                by Alpha Whisky ( 1264174 )
                Wow, you know you're right, it had never occurred to me that the melody of "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" is the same as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" presumably chosen because of it's connotations with the original Edison Phonograph recording. And "god save the Queen" is still turning up in strange embedded processor music http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGEqlNU30Tg [youtube.com]
              • First measure same melody:
                Twinkle Twinkle
                Baa Baa Black Sheep

                Second measure different:
                Little Star
                Have you any wool?

                Lets just speed this up:
                3-6 same
                7-8 different

                And Baa Baa Black sheep ends, while Twinkle Twinkle goes on for another four measures.

                When you're sticking songs with half an octave of range with no jumps of more than a third, and you're only doing major chords (because these things make it easy to learn them), you don't have a lot of options for the melody.

                Things are going to sound the same. You'd

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by spoco2 ( 322835 )
                Except that it's not the same
                Twinkle twinkle little star: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JlbjpmBFljo
                Baa Baa black sheep: http://youtube.com/watch?v=jn2KINx8Gaw

                Try singing twinkle twinkle over the top of baa baa black sheep.

                Different

            • Re:Wrong. (Score:5, Funny)

              by Intron ( 870560 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @03:09PM (#23843357)
              If you leave out all the notes, it is also John Cage's 4'33".
            • For those who aren't familiar with the alphabet song, here it is [youtube.com]...

              Most sources don't get the lyrics right, but this one I'm pretty sure is correct.
            • Strictly speaking, the traditional tune for Baa Baa Black Sheep is the same as for The Alphabet Song. A number of years ago a friend of mine discovered that you can also sing it to the melody of Hatikvah.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by sconeu ( 64226 )
              Not to mention "Anacreon in Heaven" and "The Star Spangled Banner".

            • Re:Wrong. (Score:4, Funny)

              by OakDragon ( 885217 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @10:11PM (#23849209) Journal
              An not to forget Hatless Atlas:

              ^<@<.@*
              }"_# |
              -@$&/_%
              !( @|=>
              ;`+$?^?
              ,#"~|)^G

              Translation:

              hat less at less point at star
              backbrace double base pound space bar
              dash at cash and slash base rate
              wow open tab at bar is great
              semi backquote plus cash huh DEL
              comma pound double tilde bar close BEL
            • Just like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and The Alphabet song are the same

              Weird Al's parody of ABCDEFG, no doubt.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mgiuca ( 1040724 )
              And (more to the point) Twinkle and Baa Baa Black Sheep are almost the same song.

              I just realised that recently too!
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re:Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)

          by Myrddin Wyllt ( 1188671 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:22PM (#23842669)
          No the computer is in England in November 1951 and starts out with "God Save The King." Which is the original title of the music.

        • Re:Wrong again (Score:4, Informative)

          by Kozar_The_Malignant ( 738483 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:45PM (#23843031)
          At the time (autumn 1951), it would have been "God Save the King."

          • At the time (autumn 1951), it would have been "God Save the King."

            Obviously, God wasn't listening to this new-fangled technology.

      • LTFA (Listen to etc...)

        The first song starts out as "my country tis of thee" but ends with a lick from Baa Baa Black Sheep... so, though the description could have been better, the computer DOES play the song in question.
        Yes but the article does not mention My Country Tis of Thee at all.

        • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

          by IronMagnus ( 777535 )
          Yes I believe I covered that when I said "Though the description could have been better".

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Farmer Tim ( 530755 )
            In that case, you mean "Thought the description could have been Americanised". God Save the [$monarch] is England's national anthem, the article comes from the British Broadcasting Corporation, the people who built the computer and wrote the program were English. Not referring to the American re-write seems pretty reasonable and accurate to me.

          • Yes I believe I covered that when I said "Though the description could have been better".
            Yeah, my bad. I thought you were referring to TFS not TFA. I guess your comment "could have been better".

        • Re:As noted on Hack-A-Day... (Score:5, Funny)

          by Myrddin Wyllt ( 1188671 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:27PM (#23842759)
          It does mention 'God Save The King', which is the same tune. You must have noticed that - why do you think they play that music at the Olympics when they hand out bronze medals?

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

    by lobiusmoop ( 305328 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:11PM (#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.
    • Calling "IBM 1401, A User's Manual" "simple computer music" is doing it a bit of a disservice - it's fully orchestrated, while evoking the "written by someone literate" quality that computer manuals had in the 70s and before. Bits of it regularly turn up on John Kelly's programme on RTE - if you haven't heard it, check http://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/jk/ [www.rte.ie] for weekly playlists.

      Around about the time that the 1401 tapes that Johann Johannsson used were being recorded, Curved Air were using a PDP8 for side 2 of "Phan

  • Sue Them? (Score:5, Funny)

    by PawNtheSandman ( 1238854 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:12PM (#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?!?!
  • ..should be enough for anyone.

    The recording also includes a rendition of 'God Save The King' at the beginning - didn't work, though, he died six months later aged 56.

    • 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.
  • 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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) *

      Are you sure the oldest computer music isn't just x=peek(-16636)

      That's not going to do anything. The address is wrong (you wanted -16336, or 49200...$C030 if you're doing assembly language, which was required for anything more than a low drone or the beep that PRINT CHR$(7) would give you), and even if you had gotten it right, I don't know that a single click of the speaker would qualify as "music."

  • That's Audacited! no doubt about it ;)

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

    by elrous0 ( 869638 ) * on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:34PM (#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.
  • "Hello, I am Macintosh!"

  • Lies (Score:4, Funny)

    by pengudeus ( 1017112 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:54PM (#23843157)
    All sources point to this [youtube.com] as the oldest computer music:
    • Aargh, my first Rick rolling, nice one. Please mod parent funny. (Note to self, don't click links during or after drinking fine Single Malt).

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

    by stewbacca ( 1033764 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @02:56PM (#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 @03:07PM (#23843329)
    The world's oldest RIAA subpoena.

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

    by SteveAstro ( 209000 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @03:17PM (#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 @04:24PM (#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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by FleaPlus ( 6935 )
        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.

        More recently, back when
  • The pic in the article looks like an early screen shot of the first mod tracker program. Strike up another first for the British!
  • The article also collects some other very interesting bits of computer history

    Yeah I'm not byting.

  • Not to split semantic hairs, and I absolutely feel these recordings are historically significant, but the earliest digital recordings are at least as old as the first player-piano rolls -- depending on how you constrain (or don't constrain) your recording technique semantics. Perhaps the recordings mentioned in this story are the oldest 'sampled' recordings, meaning recordings as 'listened to' by a computer, but every time I run a player-piano roll I'm listening to a (2-bit + modifier bits for sustain

  • Someone jamming out with an abacus solo.
    (later an inspiration for John Bonham)

  • I recall Zuse claiming that they invented the computer because they has some machine that performed some operations sequentially according to holes punched into film strips (what was later to become paper tape). I always thought that under that definition a player piano is a computer, because it uses some kind of punch tape to make a machine well-defined things in pre-determined order.

    If this counts, then there's been computer-generated music a lot earlier than the fifties.

    Is there actually some kind of

  • Line Printer Music (Score:2, Interesting)

    by S-100 ( 1295224 )
    Back in the 70's, the school's computer jobs were submitted on punched cards and then you waited for your output to be printed on the big line printer. Most people would have to look at the header pages to see if it was their job, but some enterprising types noted that the line printer made a distinctive tone when it printed out all of a particular character. They took this further to print out their particular fanfare at the head of their job, so they could tell from across the room when their job was be

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

    by dgriff ( 1263092 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @05:20PM (#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.

    • The speaker made a different noise according to (I think) what instruction was being processed

      Wow. I'd love that on my dual core amd64. I wonder if I could arrange integral instructions as base lines, floating point as melody and SIMD as chords? Then again, maybe my co-workers would kill me.

      They just don't make them like they used to. This is good.

  • Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)

    by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @05:25PM (#23845677)
    Daisy, Daisy,
    give me your answer-do.
    I'm half crazy
    all for the love of you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lysse ( 516445 )
      More apposite than you might think... [youtube.com] (Max Mathews built the original MUSIC languages from which CSound and CMusic are descended.)
      • Phenomenal!

        I can whole-heartedly recommend the "The Gurus of Electronic Music" set: http://www.furious.com/PERFECT/ohm/ [furious.com] to anyone intrigued with early computer-generated and electronically-composed music.

        Some fantastic recordings of early computerized speech in there (He Destroyed Her Image) along with some terrific compositions by Brian Eno, Terry Riley, and Clara Rockmore (lady Theremin virtuoso), as well as the theme from "Forbidden Planet", and other gems..

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

    by flnca ( 1022891 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @05:51PM (#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! :-)
  • Mp3s or it didn't happen.

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

    by nuckfuts ( 690967 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @07:12PM (#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.

  • That every TRS-80 Model 1 L216K machine figured out at some point that placing an AM radio near the machine and running certain commands made it possible to play music.

    And then if you played with a bit of Z80 machine language, you could modulate the cassette port.

    How I loved that machine.

  • 1024 bits? (Score:4, Funny)

    by unassimilatible ( 225662 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2008 @10:10PM (#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

  • It has a nice beat and you can dance to it.
  • That may be the oldest recorded computer music, but the oldest computer music came from Altgeld Hall, at U of I.

    The Illiac was the 4th computer ever built (modeled on the Eniac). Professors would mail in the jobs that they wanted to have run, and a computer operator would be there to run the machine 24x7. To catch buggy programs with infinite loop, the last bit of the output was routed through a speaker. As long as the operator would hear static, everything was fine, but if it started humming, then the

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