Restoring the first recording of computer music (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Restoring the first recording of computer music (2018)

bl.uk

39 pointsOJFord11 comments

In case the embedded SoundCloud player refuses to show up, here's a direct link: https://soundcloud.com/the-british-library/first-recording-o...

"The machine's not enjoying this - it's gone on strike"

"the machine's obviously not in the mood"

Really fascinating to hear these little snippets from someone (the computer operator probably?) on the recording!

Ah, thanks, I had the same issue, should've thought to include that.

While I'm commenting: I think the (original) title undersells the significance - the recording is from Turing's computing lab at Manchester, 1951.

"This audio is embedded from SoundCloud and requires cookies to function. To view this content, please enable analytics and marketing cookies using the cookies opt-in at the bottom of your screen." - lame!

You can download it from SoundCloud using yt-dlp.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

> It was a challenge to write routines that would keep the computer tolerably in tune, since the Mark II could only approximate the true pitch of many notes: for instance the true pitch of G3 is 196 Hertz but the closest frequency that the Mark II could generate was well off the note at 198.41 Hertz.

There are several notes that sounds significantly out of tune, a bit similar to a beginner violinist. Which is kind of poetic in a way. The first computer to play music (in 1951!) had not mastered it yet.

It’s truly fascinating that it was out of tune because of the similarities of the Mark II timing with sound itself .. but that also computing rapidly, rapidly started operating in a much higher frequency band and is capable these days of bending audio realities in other astonishing ways ..

More technical detail and background here:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/alan-turing-how-his-universal-mach...

Tangential: Usagi Electric plays Doom on a Bendix G-15:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no0CkQk7id0

Also very tangentially related... I remember the first time I heard a real recorded music (not a chiptune) playing from a computer. It was on my Commodore 64, at home, in 1986: I had a copy of a floppy disk with a partial recording of the song Kung-Fu Fighting.

It looked (and sounded) like this:

https://youtu.be/-rN-Mwblqbw

I don't know who made that nor why but that disk spread like wildfire: we were all making copies of it and it felt like we were living in the future.

it plays "God Save the King"

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