Australia's CSIRAC played the world's first computer music — and nobody recorded it
How Australia played the first music on a computer
Built in Sydney by the CSIR in 1949, CSIRAC was the world's fourth digital computer and the first to play music. Mathematician Geoff Hill, who had perfect pitch, worked around mercury delay-line memory that made each access take a different time, coaxing steady pitches from raw data-bus pulses. He programmed tunes like Colonel Bogey and Auld Lang Syne, but CSIRO refused to record them. A University of Melbourne team has since rebuilt the hardware and regenerated the music.
We used to see him walk past the computation laboratory, we'd say, 'There goes Percy Grainger.'
- m-i-l
> "The world's fourth digital computer ... 1949 ... CSIR Mark 1 - later renamed CSIRAC"
For anyone else triggered in the same way as me, I think the other three are:
- Colossus 1943–1945 "the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer" [0]
- ENIAC 1945 "the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer" [1]
- Manchester Baby 1948 "the first electronic stored-program computer" [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
- bazzargh
My PhD supervisor[1]'s work as a student was on CSIRAC, which he would trot out at me whenever I talked about performance issues in the code I worked on for him or the crappy PC the department had given me. "Back in my day, I had 128 bits of memory to work with... made of mercury" (I recall him saying words to that effect, but CSIRAC had 768 words, so either my memory or his was playing up)
[1] Rex Whitehead, 1937-1921. He was at University of Melbourne late 50s/early 60s when CSIRAC was there.
- bajard
I had a programmable calculator that could generate tones at specific frequencies. Then I learned that consecutive musical notes (an octave apart) have exactly double the frequency, so I was able to convert any written melody into music. But I never knew which frequency matched which note. It didn't matter much, as long as you preserve the relative intervals, the melody is recognizable.
Others thought I was some kind of wizard performing black magic, but the concept was so simple. Just one single, simple little piece of knowledge. Actually, I barely knew anything about music or sound programming.