Turing and the History of Computer Music

Abstract

The story of Turing’s pioneering work in creating the first computer-generated musical notes in Manchester in 1948–1949 is told, as well as the story of Christopher Strachey ’s work (later Oxford’s first professor of computing), who extended Turing’s note-playing routines to create computer-generated melodies. Recordings were made in Turing’s Computing Machine Laboratory by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1951: by analyzing Turing’s programming manual for the Manchester machine—the first ever written for a stored-program computer—and utilizing retrospective computer analysis of the recordings, a kind of “digital archaeology” is employed in order to reconstruct the Turing-style routines that were used to play the music recorded by the BBC. These techniques have also enabled us to restore the recordings. We establish Turing’s leading role in the history of computer music.