First computer music recording restored
Engineers have restored the first recording of computer-generated music from 1951.
The oldest recording of computer music was made in late 1951 by a BBC outside broadcast unit at the University of Manchester for the BBC Home Service program Children’s Hour. The rough two-minute recording is of the Ferranti Mark I computer playing “God Save the King”, “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, and the popular swing-band hit “In the Mood.” The recording was made on mobile recording equipment and etched into a 12-inch, single-sided acetate disc, as was normal for the time.
The restoration determined that the record, one of only two in existence, played the music at the wrong speed. To make it sound correct, “it had to be sped up, extraneous noise filtered out, and digitally pitch-corrected to remove wobbles.”
You should definitely listen to it. Quite fascinating, especially since it includes the candid commentary of the technicians as they tried to get the computer to play.
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Engineers have restored the first recording of computer-generated music from 1951.
The oldest recording of computer music was made in late 1951 by a BBC outside broadcast unit at the University of Manchester for the BBC Home Service program Children’s Hour. The rough two-minute recording is of the Ferranti Mark I computer playing “God Save the King”, “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, and the popular swing-band hit “In the Mood.” The recording was made on mobile recording equipment and etched into a 12-inch, single-sided acetate disc, as was normal for the time.
The restoration determined that the record, one of only two in existence, played the music at the wrong speed. To make it sound correct, “it had to be sped up, extraneous noise filtered out, and digitally pitch-corrected to remove wobbles.”
You should definitely listen to it. Quite fascinating, especially since it includes the candid commentary of the technicians as they tried to get the computer to play.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
along these same lines & I don’t mean to hijack this thread, ‘cuz it is cool. (BBC was into “hi-technology” as an early adopter.)
Mid- 1990’s, a British researcher came upon a number of recorded-discs (“vinyl”) from the 1920’s, that contained early British BBC, 30-line, mechanically-scanned, television-signals.
(These were originally recorded by John Logie Baird, inventor of mechanically-scanned TV. He had fairly well perfected his method of scanning live motion & worked briefly to invent a way to record the television signals for later playback. He just didn’t have the “bandwidth” available at the time.)
-The engineer hoping to extract ‘TV’ off these discs, rebuilt a working model of the original mechanical-scanning camera apparatus, in order to understand exactly how it worked, measuring the timing, & otherwise determine what type of signal would have been recorded and how it would have been played it back through a mechanical-TV set.
Then they extracted the signals off the original discs & with minimal processing were able to play-back, B&W, 30-line, mechanically-scanned television’s images. (He used computers, but he had to understand what was going on with the original equipment first.) Each disc only holds about 45 seconds of ‘video,’ but this was about 40 years before AMPEX invented “video-tape.”
http://www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/phonovision-experiments-1927-28/
I’m not seeing it off-hand, but there is a 40 minute video that goes over all of this in pretty good detail, including the reconstruction of the equipment &samples of what they were able to recover.
Mechanically-scanned, moving images, recorded onto 78 rpm ‘vinyl’ recording discs. >amazingly analog.
These “mechanical” TV sets are quite scarce & rarer than any post WW-2 set. (Working parts have a Steampunk and/or Rube Goldberg feel to them; spinning wheels, pulley’s, etc.)
And these “Phonovision” discs, are actively sought after by TV researchers.
-Definitely not “digital hi-def,” but even at 30 lines you can make out images fairly well. They are small images, but recognizable.
So there was a steam punk version of the I-pad!