Restored: Alan Turing's 1951 Computerized Music

Alan Turing (right) at the console of the Mark II computer.

New Zealand researchers said Monday they have restored the first recording of computer-generated music, created in 1951 on a gigantic contraption built by British genius Alan Turing.

The aural artefact, which paved the way for everything from synthesizers to modern electronica, opens with a staunchly conservative tune -- the British national anthem "God Save the King."

Researchers at the University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch said it showed Turing -- best known as the father of computing who broke the WWII Enigma code -- was also a musical innovator.

"Alan Turing's pioneering work in the late 1940s on transforming the computer into a musical instrument has been largely overlooked," they said.

The recording was made 65 years ago by a BBC outside-broadcast unit at the Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester, northern England.

The machine, which filled much of the lab's ground floor, was used to generate three melodies; "God Save the King," "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and Glenn Miller's swing classic "In the Mood."

But when UC professor Jack Copeland and composer Jason Long examined the 12-inch (30.5 centimeter) acetate disc containing the music, they found the audio was distorted.

"The frequencies in the recording were not accurate. The recording gave at best only a rough impression of how the computer sounded," they said.

They fixed it with electronic detective work, tweaking the speed of the audio, compensating for a "wobble" in the recording and filtering out extraneous noise.

"It was a beautiful moment when we first heard the true sound of Turing's computer," Copeland and Long said in a blog post on the British Library website.

The two-minute recording can be heard here.

Read more at Discovery News