The BBC has released the earliest known recording of music made entirely by computer. The scratchy recording dates back to the fall of 1951 and contains snippets of songs including "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and "In the Mood".
The recording was made on a Ferranti Mark 1 computer at the University of Manchester. The Ferranti Mark 1 was the first commercially available programmable computer. Programs for the Mark 1 had to fit within the machine's 1024 bit (or one kilobyte) memory. Just for comparison, figure that the average MP3 file today is around 4-6 megabytes in size - thousands of times the size of the Mark 1's memory.
The recordings were made for a BBC children's show and predate what was thought to be the first recording of electronic music - made by an IBM mainframe in 1957 - by six years. The Ferranti Mark 1 set the stage for the commercial growth of computers and was the forerunner to all the Macs and PCs of today.
The recording can be heard here.
No comments:
Post a Comment