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Computer music
Computer music is the application of computing technology in music composition, to help human composers create new music or to have computers independently create music, such as with algorithmic composition programs. It includes the theory and application of new and existing computer software technologies and basic aspects of music, such as sound synthesis, digital signal processing, sound design, sonic diffusion, acoustics, electrical engineering, and psychoacoustics. The field of computer music can trace its roots back to the origins of electronic music, and the first experiments and innovations with electronic instruments at the turn of the 20th century.
Much of the work on computer music has drawn on the relationship between music and mathematics, a relationship that has been noted since the Ancient Greeks described the "harmony of the spheres".
Musical melodies were first generated by the computer originally named the CSIR Mark 1 (later renamed CSIRAC) in Australia in 1950. There were newspaper reports from America and England (early and recently) that computers may have played music earlier, but thorough research has debunked these stories as there is no evidence to support the newspaper reports (some of which were speculative). Research has shown that people speculated about computers playing music, possibly because computers would make noises, but there is no evidence that they did it.
The world's first computer to play music was the CSIR Mark 1 (later named CSIRAC), which was designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard in the late 1940s. Mathematician Geoff Hill programmed the CSIR Mark 1 to play popular musical melodies from the very early 1950s. In 1950 the CSIR Mark 1 was used to play music, the first known use of a digital computer for that purpose. The music was never recorded, but it has been accurately reconstructed. In 1951 it publicly played the "Colonel Bogey March" of which only the reconstruction exists. However, the CSIR Mark 1 played standard repertoire and was not used to extend musical thinking or composition practice, as Max Mathews did, which is current computer-music practice.
The first music to be performed in England was a performance of the British National Anthem that was programmed by Christopher Strachey on the Ferranti Mark 1, late in 1951. Later that year, short extracts of three pieces were recorded there by a BBC outside broadcasting unit: the National Anthem, "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep", and "In the Mood"; this is recognized as the earliest recording of a computer to play music as the CSIRAC music was never recorded. This recording can be heard at the Manchester University site. Researchers at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch declicked and restored this recording in 2016 and the results may be heard on SoundCloud.
Two further major 1950s developments were the origins of digital sound synthesis by computer, and of algorithmic composition programs beyond rote playback. Amongst other pioneers, the musical chemists Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson worked on a series of algorithmic composition experiments from 1956 to 1959, manifested in the 1957 premiere of the Illiac Suite for string quartet. Max Mathews at Bell Laboratories developed the influential MUSIC I program and its descendants, further popularising computer music through a 1963 article in Science. The first professional composer to work with digital synthesis was James Tenney, who created a series of digitally synthesized and/or algorithmically composed pieces at Bell Labs using Mathews' MUSIC III system, beginning with Analog #1 (Noise Study) (1961). After Tenney left Bell Labs in 1964, he was replaced by composer Jean-Claude Risset, who conducted research on the synthesis of instrumental timbres and composed Computer Suite from Little Boy (1968).
Early computer-music programs typically did not run in real time, although the first experiments on CSIRAC and the Ferranti Mark 1 did operate in real time. From the late 1950s, with increasingly sophisticated programming, programs would run for hours or days, on multi million-dollar computers, to generate a few minutes of music. One way around this was to use a 'hybrid system' of digital control of an analog synthesiser and early examples of this were Max Mathews' GROOVE system (1969) and also MUSYS by Peter Zinovieff (1969).
Until now partial use has been exploited for musical research into the substance and form of sound (convincing examples are those of Hiller and Isaacson in Urbana, Illinois, US; Iannis Xenakis in Paris and Pietro Grossi in Florence, Italy).
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Computer music AI simulator
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Computer music
Computer music is the application of computing technology in music composition, to help human composers create new music or to have computers independently create music, such as with algorithmic composition programs. It includes the theory and application of new and existing computer software technologies and basic aspects of music, such as sound synthesis, digital signal processing, sound design, sonic diffusion, acoustics, electrical engineering, and psychoacoustics. The field of computer music can trace its roots back to the origins of electronic music, and the first experiments and innovations with electronic instruments at the turn of the 20th century.
Much of the work on computer music has drawn on the relationship between music and mathematics, a relationship that has been noted since the Ancient Greeks described the "harmony of the spheres".
Musical melodies were first generated by the computer originally named the CSIR Mark 1 (later renamed CSIRAC) in Australia in 1950. There were newspaper reports from America and England (early and recently) that computers may have played music earlier, but thorough research has debunked these stories as there is no evidence to support the newspaper reports (some of which were speculative). Research has shown that people speculated about computers playing music, possibly because computers would make noises, but there is no evidence that they did it.
The world's first computer to play music was the CSIR Mark 1 (later named CSIRAC), which was designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard in the late 1940s. Mathematician Geoff Hill programmed the CSIR Mark 1 to play popular musical melodies from the very early 1950s. In 1950 the CSIR Mark 1 was used to play music, the first known use of a digital computer for that purpose. The music was never recorded, but it has been accurately reconstructed. In 1951 it publicly played the "Colonel Bogey March" of which only the reconstruction exists. However, the CSIR Mark 1 played standard repertoire and was not used to extend musical thinking or composition practice, as Max Mathews did, which is current computer-music practice.
The first music to be performed in England was a performance of the British National Anthem that was programmed by Christopher Strachey on the Ferranti Mark 1, late in 1951. Later that year, short extracts of three pieces were recorded there by a BBC outside broadcasting unit: the National Anthem, "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep", and "In the Mood"; this is recognized as the earliest recording of a computer to play music as the CSIRAC music was never recorded. This recording can be heard at the Manchester University site. Researchers at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch declicked and restored this recording in 2016 and the results may be heard on SoundCloud.
Two further major 1950s developments were the origins of digital sound synthesis by computer, and of algorithmic composition programs beyond rote playback. Amongst other pioneers, the musical chemists Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson worked on a series of algorithmic composition experiments from 1956 to 1959, manifested in the 1957 premiere of the Illiac Suite for string quartet. Max Mathews at Bell Laboratories developed the influential MUSIC I program and its descendants, further popularising computer music through a 1963 article in Science. The first professional composer to work with digital synthesis was James Tenney, who created a series of digitally synthesized and/or algorithmically composed pieces at Bell Labs using Mathews' MUSIC III system, beginning with Analog #1 (Noise Study) (1961). After Tenney left Bell Labs in 1964, he was replaced by composer Jean-Claude Risset, who conducted research on the synthesis of instrumental timbres and composed Computer Suite from Little Boy (1968).
Early computer-music programs typically did not run in real time, although the first experiments on CSIRAC and the Ferranti Mark 1 did operate in real time. From the late 1950s, with increasingly sophisticated programming, programs would run for hours or days, on multi million-dollar computers, to generate a few minutes of music. One way around this was to use a 'hybrid system' of digital control of an analog synthesiser and early examples of this were Max Mathews' GROOVE system (1969) and also MUSYS by Peter Zinovieff (1969).
Until now partial use has been exploited for musical research into the substance and form of sound (convincing examples are those of Hiller and Isaacson in Urbana, Illinois, US; Iannis Xenakis in Paris and Pietro Grossi in Florence, Italy).