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The First Computer Music: Australia, 1951

Abstract

The CSIR Mk1, later renamed CSIRAC, built by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Sydney, was programmed by Geoff Hill to play popular tunes, among them the “Colonel Bogey March”, in 1951 and possibly as early as 1950. It played them in public at a conference in Sydney in August 1951. Its performances were never recorded; the tunes heard today are reconstructions from the original paper tapes. The oldest surviving recording of computer music comes from the Ferranti Mark 1 in Manchester, captured by the BBC in the autumn of 1951.

The Machine

The CSIR Mk1 was designed by Trevor Pearcey and built with Maston Beard at the CSIR Radiophysics Laboratory in Sydney, where it ran its first test program in November 1949. It was the fourth or fifth stored-program computer in the world, depending on who is counting, and the first outside Britain and the United States. It had about 2,000 valves and 768 words of 20 bits in mercury delay lines. In 1955 it moved to the University of Melbourne and was renamed CSIRAC. See Australia’s Tech Industry.

The machine was built for scientific computing: differential equations, matrix work and the other arithmetic that CSIR’s scientists needed.

How It Played

The machine’s one familiar output device was a loudspeaker, the “hooter”, which programmers used to follow the progress of a program by ear: each pulse sent to it made a click. Geoff Hill, the machine’s first programmer, who had perfect pitch and came from a musical family, worked out that clicks sent at a steady rate produce a tone. A short loop of instructions set the interval between clicks, and therefore the pitch; the number of passes set the length of the note. No extra hardware was needed.

Hill programmed several popular tunes this way, and at the Conference on Automatic Computing Machinery at the University of Sydney on 7 to 9 August 1951 the machine played the “Colonel Bogey March” for the visitors. Similar experiments ran at Manchester, where the BBC recorded the Ferranti Mark 1 playing tunes in the autumn of 1951, and later at Bell Labs, where Max Mathews began digital sound synthesis in 1957. Whether the Australian machine played first depends on dating Hill’s earliest tunes, which may go back to 1950; the claim rests on contemporary accounts rather than a recording.

The Reconstruction

No audio of the 1951 performances survives. Around 2000 the composer and researcher Paul Doornbusch reconstructed the music from CSIRAC’s surviving program tapes and documentation, with hardware that reproduced the machine’s pulse shapes and software that ran the old programs. CSIRAC, switched off in 1964, is the oldest surviving first-generation electronic computer and has been on display at Scienceworks in Melbourne since 2018. The story of computing and music, from CSIRAC through synthesizers and digital audio workstations, is told in Computing and Music Creation.

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