Alan Turing's Computer-Generated Music

Electronic, Techno and House music are some of the most popular genres of music nowadays. With music-creation software and technology at its peak, many independent artists and producers now have the power to create their own music. It is also easier now to fine-tune and clean up tracks performed by artists, ensuring that music comes out at their best quality.

Although many artists have only been discovered recently, history's favorite computer scientist, Alan Turing, has been creating computer-generated music since World War 2. Known for his hacking of the Nazi Enigma machine,Turing is considered the father of artificial intelligence.

Turing recorded three different tracks: "God Save the King", "Ba Baa Black Sheep," and Glenn Miller's "In the Mood." In his Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester England, Turing and several BBC broadcasters recorded these songs onto a 12-inch acetate disc using a prototype Mark II computer, early hardware that was big enough to occupy the entire room.

"The hooter", Turing's basic loudspeaker at the time, played approximated notes by repeating short bursts at high speeds, according to The Verge. The low fidelity and grainy-sound of the initial recording was caused by the inaccuracies of sound frequencies during sound recording. "The frequencies in the recording were not accurate," noted University of Canterbury Professor Jack Copeland and composer Jason Long said in an AFP article. "The recording gave at best only a rough impression of how the computer sounded."

Recently, efforts have been made by Copeland and Long at the University of Canterbury to give more clarity to the recorded track. According to Gizmodo, "...researchers removed extraneous noise from the recordings, and adjusted the speed of the audio, which compensated for the incessant "wobble"." A sample of the restored recording is available here.

The restoration, although intended to clarify the contents of the original recording, still includes the vocal reactions of Turing and his colleagues while recording their music, in order to bring the listener back to the time and situation these pioneers were in.

In conclusion, any artist should be grateful for Alan Turing and his colleagues for being leading pioneers of digitizing music for enhancement and creation.