Music By Computers
A computer program that generates music. How quaint.
I remember when I first heard computer-generated music. My father showed me a book, “Music By Computers,” and we listened to some of the recordings of music generated by various kinds of programs.
That was in the 1980s. “Music By Computers” had been published in 1969, compiled from papers presented in 1966.
The recordings for the book were supplied as gramophone records. Thin, floppy, playable gramophone records, tucked in to an envelope at the back of the book.
This was quaint, old technology. The recordings were already twenty years old. The music sounded like it had been made by a computer... and yet it was tolerably pleasant or entertaining music, perhaps, depending on one's expectations and level of musical sophistication.
We dabbled with making our own programs... beep-booply-beep-boop... on our modern Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
People are still playing music, and still playing with music generators. Now folks are calling their music generator programs “AI” to ride the latest hype wave...
I'm glad to see people are still having fun with the idea.
An excerpt from “Music By Computers”:
- Title Music to LINK, Side 2, Band 4
This short excerpt is the background music for the title and screen credits for the short documentary film LINK produced by the Argonne National Laboratory film group [3]. The film explains the operation of a computer program LINK, written by R. K. Clark of the Applied Mathematics Division at Argonne, for use in the automatic analysis of spark chamber photographs taken during experiments in high energy physics. Since it concerns a CDC-3600 computer program and includes com¬ puter-produced animation sequences which were photographed directly from the computer cathode-ray-tube display and which illustrate the program operation, it seemed only appropriate for the computer to provide the music with which to accompany and emphasize its accomplishments. Though the selection is only a minute long, it is in fact quite complex, accurately synchronized to the film (synchronization is a trivial problem) and contains some noteworthy illustrative effects.
An excerpt from a review of “Music By Computers” by a Mr Howe in 1970:
... [This work in recent years in computer synthesis of sound] involves the work of both scientists and composers, and thus raises both technological and aesthetic considerations. For people unfamiliar with this kind of research, the discussions in the book will seem very sophisticated and advanced, and it will appear that many rather general conclusions are now beginning to emerge out of quite disparate approaches to common problems. This impression, however, does not stand up under careful investigation...
Illustrations derived from scans of the title pages of the book, accessed through archive.org. First excerpt from the same. Second excerpt from a review by Hubert S. Howe, Jr. in Perspectives of New Music Vol. 8, No. 2 (1970), pp. 151-15, accessed through JSTOR.
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