CSIRAC

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 about 1957, 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 at CSIRAC and the Ferranti Mark 1 did not use a digital-to-analog converter or pre-calculated synthesis waveforms. 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. 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.