Researchers at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand have recreated the world’s first computer generated music, produced in Alan Turing’s Computing Machine Laboratory in the UK in 1951.The recording of God Save the King, nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep and Glenn
Miller’s hit In The Mood was created by the BBC on a 12-inch (30cm)
single-sided acetate disc.
According to University of Canterbury distinguished professor Jack Copeland,
the frequencies in the recording were not accurate: the recording gave at best
only a rough impression of how the computer sounded. “With some electronic
detective work it proved possible to restore the recording, with the result
that the true sound of this ancestral computer can be heard once again, for the
first time in more than half a century,” he says.
The researchers say it was young schoolteacher and pianist Christopher Strachey
who first programmed the national anthem God Save the King, debugging his
program during an epic all-night session with Turing’s enormous computer. Strachey later became one of Britain’s pioneering computer scientists.
