, Australia's first digital computer, as displayed at the
Melbourne Museum Much of the work on computer music has drawn on the relationship between
music and mathematics, a relationship that has been noted since the
Ancient Greeks described the "
harmony of the spheres". Musical melodies were first generated by the computer originally named the CSIR Mark 1 (later renamed
CSIRAC) in Australia in 1950. There were newspaper reports from America and England (early and recently) that computers may have played music earlier, but thorough research has debunked these stories as there is no evidence to support the newspaper reports (some of which were speculative). Research has shown that people
speculated about computers playing music, possibly because computers would make noises, but there is no evidence that they did it. The world's first computer to play music was the CSIR Mark 1 (later named CSIRAC), which was designed and built by
Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard in the late 1940s. Mathematician Geoff Hill programmed the CSIR Mark 1 to play popular musical melodies from the very early 1950s. In 1950 the CSIR Mark 1 was used to play music, the first known use of a digital computer for that purpose. The music was never recorded, but it has been accurately reconstructed. In 1951 it publicly played the "
Colonel Bogey March" of which only the reconstruction exists. However, the CSIR Mark 1 played standard repertoire and was not used to extend musical thinking or composition practice, as
Max Mathews did, which is current computer-music practice. The first music to be performed in England was a performance of the
British National Anthem that was programmed by
Christopher Strachey on the
Ferranti Mark 1, late in 1951. Later that year, short extracts of three pieces were recorded there by a
BBC outside broadcasting unit: the National Anthem, "
Baa, Baa, Black Sheep", and "
In the Mood"; this is recognized as the earliest recording of a computer to play music as the CSIRAC music was never recorded. This recording can be heard at the Manchester University site. Researchers at the
University of Canterbury, Christchurch declicked and restored this recording in 2016 and the results may be heard on
SoundCloud. Max Mathews at Bell Laboratories developed the influential
MUSIC I program and its descendants, further popularising computer music through a 1963 article in
Science. The first professional composer to work with digital synthesis was
James Tenney, who created a series of digitally synthesized and/or algorithmically composed pieces at Bell Labs using Mathews' MUSIC III system, beginning with
Analog #1 (Noise Study) (1961). After Tenney left Bell Labs in 1964, he was replaced by composer
Jean-Claude Risset, who conducted research on the synthesis of instrumental timbres and composed
Computer Suite from Little Boy (1968). Early computer-music programs typically did not run in
real time, although the first experiments on CSIRAC and the
Ferranti Mark 1 did operate in
real time. From the late 1950s, with increasingly sophisticated programming, programs would run for hours or days, on multi million-dollar computers, to generate a few minutes of music. One way around this was to use a 'hybrid system' of digital control of an
analog synthesiser and early examples of this were Max Mathews' GROOVE system (1969) and also MUSYS by
Peter Zinovieff (1969). Until now partial use has been exploited for musical research into the substance and form of sound (convincing examples are those of Hiller and Isaacson in Urbana, Illinois, US;
Iannis Xenakis in Paris and
Pietro Grossi in Florence, Italy). In May 1967 the first experiments in computer music in Italy were carried out by the
S 2F M studio in Florence in collaboration with
General Electric Information Systems Italy.
Olivetti-General Electric GE 115 (
Olivetti S.p.A.) is used by Grossi as a
performer: three programmes were prepared for these experiments. The programmes were written by Ferruccio Zulian and used by
Pietro Grossi for playing Bach, Paganini, and Webern works and for studying new sound structures. , Stanford University.
John Chowning's work on
FM synthesis from the 1960s to the 1970s allowed much more efficient digital synthesis, eventually leading to the development of the affordable FM synthesis-based
Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer, released in 1983. Interesting sounds must have a fluidity and changeability that allows them to remain fresh to the ear. In computer music this subtle ingredient is bought at a high computational cost, both in terms of the number of items requiring detail in a score and in the amount of interpretive work the instruments must produce to realize this detail in sound.
In Japan In Japan, experiments in computer music date back to 1962, when
Keio University professor Sekine and
Toshiba engineer Hayashi experimented with the computer. This resulted in a piece entitled
TOSBAC Suite, influenced by the
Illiac Suite. Later Japanese computer music compositions include a piece by Kenjiro Ezaki presented during
Osaka Expo '70 and "Panoramic Sonore" (1974) by music critic Akimichi Takeda. Ezaki also published an article called "Contemporary Music and Computers" in 1970. Since then, Japanese research in computer music has largely been carried out for commercial purposes in
popular music, though some of the more serious Japanese musicians used large computer systems such as the
Fairlight in the 1970s. In the late 1970s these systems became commercialized, including systems like the
Roland MC-8 Microcomposer, where a
microprocessor-based system controls an
analog synthesizer, released in 1978. ==Advances==