CSIRAC

CSIRAC (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer) was the first computer built in Australia and one of the earliest stored-program computers in the world. It is now recognised as the first computer anywhere to play music.

CSIRAC ran its first program in November 1949. Geoff Hill, Australia’s first software engineer, programmed it to play popular musical melodies through its loudspeaker in 1950 or 1951 — the first known instance of a digital computer making music. The music was never recorded at the time, but it has been accurately reconstructed from the original punched-paper program tapes, circuit diagrams, and the recollections of surviving engineers.

The sound-production method was as basic as possible: raw bit-stream pulses from the computer’s data bus were sent directly to an audio amplifier and loudspeaker. Producing a stable, pitched tone from this required considerable programming ingenuity, given CSIRAC’s serial architecture and variable memory-access timing.

In Melbourne from 1957 on, mathematics professor Thomas Cherry generalised the music program so that anyone familiar with standard notation could prepare a punched-paper data tape for CSIRAC to perform. This “Music Programme” has meaningful parallels with Max Mathews’s MUSIC I at Bell Labs (also 1957).

It is important to note that the early computer music experiments with CSIRAC (and the Ferranti Mark 1) did not use a digital-to-analog converter or pre-calculated synthesis waveforms, or music composers – it was an experiment by engineers, often as an extreme programming challenge only. The developments initiated by Max Mathews and John Pierce at Bell Labs have the distinction of being the first musical use of a DAC, and the first to investigate the rich musical possibilities of the computer by having composers involved. It is Mathews and Pierce whose work led to the development of computer music as we know it today.

CSIRAC is currently on display at Melbourne Museum. More information can be found at Wikipedia, University of Melbourne, and CSIRO.

The Music of CSIRAC: Australia’s First Computer Music
Common Ground Publishing, 2005 
Available from Amazon and the author via email. 

 

A downloadable PDF of the book is available here. 

Research Papers

Three papers by Paul Doornbusch on the history of CSIRAC’s music and early computer music have been published  internationally. All are available for download below and from Academia.edu and ResearchGate.

• 2004

  “Computer Sound Synthesis in 1951: The Music of CSIRAC”  [PDF]

  Computer Music Journal 28(1), pp. 10–25. MIT Press.

  The primary research paper documenting the CSIRAC music reconstruction project. Describes the sound-production method, the programming techniques required to generate stable pitches from a serial computer with variable memory-access timing, the reconstruction methodology, and the historical evidence establishing CSIRAC as the world’s first computer to play music. Includes full technical analysis of the original punched-paper program tapes and circuit diagrams.

• 2013

  “The Music of CSIRAC, Some Untold Stories”  [PDF]

  Proceedings of ISEA2013: 19th International Symposium of Electronic Art, Sydney.

  Draws on first-hand interviews with original CSIRAC personnel to document stories and background left out of the book — including Geoff Hill’s late-night phone call to his mother to ask if the computer’s scale was in tune, Percy Grainger walking past the Computation Laboratory while CSIRAC was still running, and the internal politics that prevented the music from being broadcast or recorded. Also discusses the research methods used to document and authenticate CSIRAC’s musical activity.

• 2017

  “Early Computer Music Experiments in Australia, England and the USA”  [PDF]

  Proceedings of MuSA 2017, Karlsruhe, Germany.

  A comparative critical examination of the earliest computer music activity in Australia (CSIR Mark 1), England (Ferranti Mark 1, Pilot ACE), and the USA (Bell Telephone Laboratories). Analyses why the Australian and English developments — which pre-dated Bell Labs by six or more years and produced real-time computer music — did not lead to further musical investigation, while the USA work under Max Mathews became the foundation of computer music as an international discipline. Includes previously unreported details about the Pilot ACE computer’s capacity to generate its own algorithmic music autonomously from around 1952.

Video: Trevor Pearcey on CSIRAC Music

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The CSIRAC Music Project — Image Gallery

A three-minute video montage of photographs, documents, and images from the CSIRAC music reconstruction project — including the original punched-paper tapes, circuit diagrams, and the engineers who made the music possible. As included on the CD that comes with the book.

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© Paul Doornbusch — all images copyright Paul Doornbusch.

The Music — MP3 Recordings

Accurate reconstructions of all music played by CSIRAC, based on the original program tapes and engineering documentation. The reconstruction process is described in full in the Computer Music Journal paper (PDF).

Click a track name to download the file. Use the download link if a track does not play in the browser due to connection speed.

This project was generously supported by The Australia Council for the Arts, the University of Melbourne Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Museum Victoria, and the Pearcey Foundation.