In 1951, a group of BBC broadcasters arrived at the Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester, England, for a music recital. There, they made the first recording of computer-generated music, produced by the Mark II computer invented by Alan Turing, widely considered the father of computing.
The recording, stored on a 12-inch acetate disc, holds snippets of the British national anthem, the nursery rhyme, “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” and a performance of the Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” The recital is famous for being the earliest instance of computer-generated music, but it was not until recently that researchers from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand noticed that the tunes were distorted. more
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