The First Computer Music: Australia, 1951
Zusammenfassung
The first computer to play music was CSIRAC (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer), built at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Australia. In 1951, programmer Geoff Hill loaded a melody — “Colonel Bogey March” — into CSIRAC’s memory and had the computer produce musical notes through its radio frequency output. Australia had the world’s first music-playing computer. CSIRAC’s performances were never recorded, however — only later reconstructions exist. The oldest surviving recording of computer-generated music comes instead from the Ferranti Mark 1 at Manchester, captured by the BBC later in 1951.
CSIRAC
CSIRAC was designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard in Melbourne, operational from November 1949. It was the fourth stored-program digital computer in the world (after the Manchester Baby, EDSAC, and BINAC) and the first in the Southern Hemisphere. CSIRAC used 30 × 30 matrix memory (mercury delay lines), a 1,000-word drum memory, and could execute approximately 1,000 instructions per second.
The computer’s official purpose was scientific computing: solving differential equations, doing matrix operations, and performing the arithmetic-intensive calculations that the CSIRO’s scientists and engineers needed. It was a research tool, not an entertainment device.
Geoff Hill, one of CSIRAC’s programmers, wrote a program that caused CSIRAC’s radio frequency oscillator to produce audio tones at specified frequencies for specified durations — the basic elements of music. The first tunes were simple: “Colonel Bogey March” (the tune associated with whistling British soldiers) and several others.
Why Australia First
CSIRAC’s music emerged from the same culture of exploration that characterized early computer laboratories. The people building these machines understood them as general-purpose tools and were curious about what they could do beyond scientific computation. Playing music required no additional hardware — CSIRAC already had radio frequency components that could produce tones; it required only a program to control the frequencies and timing.
Similar musical experiments were happening at Manchester (the Ferranti Mark 1’s computer music was recorded by the BBC in 1951, the same year as CSIRAC) and later at Bell Labs (Max Mathews’s work on digital audio synthesis from 1957). CSIRAC was first to play music by a few months, though — unlike the Manchester machine — its performances were never captured on disc; the priority rests on documentation and contemporary accounts.
The Preservation
CSIRAC’s music was never recorded. No audio of the 1951 performances survives — what exists today are reconstructions made by researcher Paul Doornbusch around 2000, who rebuilt the tunes from CSIRAC’s surviving programs and documentation. (The oldest surviving recording of computer music is the Ferranti Mark 1’s, captured by the BBC at Manchester in late 1951.) CSIRAC itself is preserved at Museum Victoria in Melbourne — the only complete first-generation computer in the world that still exists.
CSIRAC itself, decommissioned in 1964, was preserved on its own merits as Australia’s national computing artifact — one of the few surviving physical computers from the first generation. The story of computing and music creation, from CSIRAC through synthesizers and digital audio workstations, is covered in Computing and Music Creation.