![]() In fact computer music history might go back as far as the early days of the BINAC computer, but unfortunately we may never know. It's the dedication event of the completion of the first successful UNIVAC I installation for the US Census Bureau, which took place on June 14th, 1951. That "dedication party" Wilson mentions can indeed be dated. But it was supposed to have been a surprise and it wasn't. It only had eight notes and it played "For he's a jolly good fellow," or something like that. There were some engineers working on the BINAC and they heard it. It was supposed to have been a surprise, and we did it at 2 o'clock in the morning. WILSON: Well, if you remember it, the dedication party, when we got the first machine running, John Mauchly programmed. What does help us however is the conversation between Wilson and Holberton that now follows: Hmm, interesting, but that doesn't really help us, since nobody puts a date on it. "Betty" Holberton starts to wonder:ĭoes anybody know who actually wrote the first generator for the UNIVAC or for any computer that played music? Herb Finney? So I installed a detector in the console and an amplifier and a speaker so that you could deliberately listen to these things.Īt this point, Frances E. After a while we noticed that you could recognize the pattern of what was happening at the moment by listening to the static on the radio. ![]() When we were testing BINAC out, we were working two shifts and we worked all night long, and we had a radio going. ![]() During the main panel, the attention suddenly turns to the little lpudspeaker that was installed on the machine for diagnostic purposes. The Unisys Corporation brought together many of the pioneers and masterminds behind the UNIVAC I computer for a commemoratory Univac Conference. In May 1990, the Charles Babbage Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, and The UNIVAC I control panel, designed in part by Betty Holberton However, according to my most recent research, it's time to change the record once again. In fact, Geoff Hill's 1951 experiments have held the status of the first computer music in history ever since. Also, in 2008 the BBC unveiled a hidden gem from their archives: A computer music recording from autumn of 1951, done by Christopher Strachey on the Ferranti Mark I at the University of Manchester just a few weeks after the Sidney performance. In the early 2000s however, a research team concerned with the history of the CSIRAC mainframe at the University of Sidney, Australia found documents confirming a musical performance by that machine on August 7th-9th, 1951. For many years it was believed that the first experiments in computer music were done by Max Mathews at Bell Labs in 1957.
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