Computer Sound Synthesis in 1951: The Music of CSIRAC

Computer Music Journal, 28:1, pp. 10–25, Spring 2004 q 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Australian-built ‘‘automatic computer’’ initially known as the CSIR Mk1, and later known as CSIRAC, was one of the world’s earliest storedprogram electronic digital computers (Williams 1997). (See Figure 1.) Coincidentally, it may also have been the Ž rst computer to play music, even though later work done elsewhere in the 1950s is clearly the origin of computer music as we know the Ž eld today. Developed in Sydney in the late 1940s by the Council for ScientiŽ c and Industrial Research (CSIR), the CSIR Mk1 ran its Ž rst program in November 1949. Geoff Hill, a mathematician and Australia’s Ž rst real software engineer, programmed the CSIR Mk1 to play popular musical melodies through its loudspeaker starting in 1951, if not 1950. The CSIR Mk1 was moved to the University of Melbourne in June 1955 and renamed CSIRAC (McCann and Thorne 2000). It performed useful and trailblazing service there until 1964. During CSIRAC’s time in Melbourne, the mathematics professor Thomas Cherry programmed it to perform music, developing a system and program such that anyone who understood standard musical notation could create a punched-paper data tape for CSIRAC to perform that music. Although the music performed by the CSIR Mk1 may seem crude and unremarkable compared to the most advanced musical developments of the time, and especially to what is possible now, it is probably the Ž rst music in the world to be performed on a computer, and the means of production lay at the leading edge of technological sophistication at that time. These Ž rst steps of using a computer in a musical sense occurred in isolation, but they are still interesting, because the leap of imagination in using the  exibility of a general-purpose computer to create music and the programming ingenuity required to achieve it are signiŽ cant. CSIRAC took some initial steps in that direction. An Overview of CSIRAC