Restoring the first recording of computer music (2018)

2 days ago

The earliest known recording of computer-generated music was made in 1951 by a BBC outside broadcast unit in Manchester, capturing melodies played by a primeval computer.
Alan Turing's work in the late 1940s on transforming computers into musical instruments has been largely overlooked, predating the commonly cited first computer-generated musical notes in 1957 at Bell Labs.
Turing's Manchester computer used a special instruction to produce sounds, which, when repeated in patterns, could generate different musical notes, a foundational discovery for computer music.
Christopher Strachey, a schoolteacher and talented pianist, programmed the Manchester computer to play the National Anthem, marking one of the first complete pieces of music generated by a computer.
The BBC recording from 1951 included performances of the National Anthem, Baa Baa Black Sheep, and Glenn Miller’s In the Mood, though the exact authorship of these routines remains uncertain.
Restoration efforts revealed that the original BBC recording played at an incorrect speed due to the turntable running too fast during the acetate disc cutting, distorting the pitches.
Through computer-assisted analysis and pitch-correction, researchers were able to restore the recording to accurately represent the true sound of Turing's computer for the first time in over half a century.

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