Researchers restore first ever computer music recording

The aural artefact, which paved the way for everything from synthesizers to modern electronica, opens with a staunchly conservative tune -- the British national anthem "God Save the King".

Researchers at the University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch said it showed Turing -- best known as the father of computing who broke the WWII Enigma code -- was also a musical innovator.

"Alan Turing's pioneering work in the late 1940s on transforming the computer into a musical instrument has been largely overlooked," they said.

The recording was made 65 years ago by a BBC outside-broadcast unit at the Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester, northern England.

The machine, which filled much of the lab's ground floor, was used to generate three melodies; "God Save the King", "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and Glenn Miller's swing classic "In the Mood".

But when UC professor Jack Copeland and composer Jason Long examined the 12-inch (30.5 centimetre) acetate disc containing the music, they found the audio was distorted.

"The frequencies in the recording were not accurate. The recording gave at best only a rough impression of how the computer sounded," they said.

They fixed it with electronic detective work, tweaking the speed of the audio, compensating for a "wobble" in the recording and filtering out extraneous noise.

"It was a beautiful moment when we first heard the true sound of Turing's computer," Copeland and Long said in a blog post on the British Library website.

The two-minute recording can be heard here: http://blogs.bl.uk/files/first-recorded-computer-music---copeland-long-restoration.mp3

It features short snippets of the tunes rendered in a slightly grating drone, like electronic bagpipes.

There are also a number of glitches and when the music halts during the Glenn Miller number, a presenter comments: "The machine's obviously not in the mood".

While Turing programmed the first musical notes into a computer, he had little interest in stringing them together into tunes.

That work was carried out by a school teacher named Christopher Strachey, who went on to become a renowned computer scientist in his own right.

Strachey recalled that Turing's taciturn response upon hearing his machine play music was "good show". Turing was a computer scientist, philosopher and cryptologist who played a crucial role in breaking the Nazi's Enigma Code.

As depicted in the Oscar-winning movie "The Imitation Game", he was prosecuted for homosexuality and forced to undergo chemical castration, killing himself in 1954 at the age of 41.