How Australia played the first music on a computer | Hacker News Reader

How Australia played the first music on a computer

pearcey.org.au

30 pointsSkyfall10614 comments

My PhD supervisor[1]'s work as a student was on CSIRAC, which he would trot out at me whenever I talked about performance issues in the code I worked on for him or the crappy PC the department had given me. "Back in my day, I had 128 bits of memory to work with... made of mercury" (I recall him saying words to that effect, but CSIRAC had 768 words, so either my memory or his was playing up)

[1] Rex Whitehead, 1937-1921. He was at University of Melbourne late 50s/early 60s when CSIRAC was there.

Related, I have been enjoying this great series on Australian compute history and innovations (including CSIRAC, SILLIAC, CIRRUS, ARCTURUS, CSIRONET) covering the same period:

[0]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIizEY7AraGzlUr2Hyeb03yhR...

> "The world's fourth digital computer ... 1949 ... CSIR Mark 1 - later renamed CSIRAC"

For anyone else triggered in the same way as me, I think the other three are:

- Colossus 1943–1945 "the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer" [0]

- ENIAC 1945 "the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer" [1]

- Manchester Baby 1948 "the first electronic stored-program computer" [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby

Z3 (1941)?

According to [0] it was electromechanical rather electronic: "There were earlier electromechanical computers, the first being Konrad Zuse's Z3, completed in Berlin in 1941."

Interesting that all the quotes above start "the first" or "the world's first" followed by some very specific definition.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware#... which does list the CSIRAC but I'm not sure which combination of options you need to get it to be "The world's fourth digital computer".

I had a programmable calculator that could generate tones at specific frequencies. Then I learned that consecutive musical notes (an octave apart) have exactly double the frequency, so I was able to convert any written melody into music. But I never knew which frequency matched which note. It didn't matter much, as long as you preserve the relative intervals, the melody is recognizable.

Others thought I was some kind of wizard performing black magic, but the concept was so simple. Just one single, simple little piece of knowledge. Actually, I barely knew anything about music or sound programming.

As a child I made a 'cat repeller' which was just my calculator playing a high tone I could use to chase the cat away when I was busy and it was fooling around with my projects.

> How Australia played the first music on a computer

Backwards?

Which must have lead to the other Australian electronic music accomplishments: Funky Town, the Fairlight CMI and Severed Heads.

Obligatory: https://youtu.be/ClSnMCTkBpw

Was about to link the same, would recommend everyone who's into electronic music to listen to that whole album.

There's also the wholesome version:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tDgxPsNX0Hg

Less obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfq2OZ8lpA8

There was a period in the 70s/80s when computer music meant raw code, original DSP experiments, and real creative weirdness.

Academics are still pushing the limits, but very little seems to get into broad circulation and it doesn't seem the studios or recording technology developers are interested in new innovations either. There is a big community around Max and Pd, csound still gets some love especially now that computers are powerful enough to run csound instruments in real time. IRCAM has a fascinating site with lots of free and Free software to download and play with, and resources for finding all kinds of new electronic music pushing various boundaries.

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