Apr 10 2025 100 mins 4
Episode 166
Chapter 26, Early Computer Music (1950–70). Works Recommended from my book, Electronic and Experimental Music
Welcome to the Archive of Electronic Music. This is Thom Holmes.
This podcast is produced as a companion to my book, Electronic and Experimental Music, published by Routledge. Each of these episodes corresponds to a chapter in the text and an associated list of recommended works, also called Listen in the text. They provide listening examples of vintage electronic works featured in the text.
The works themselves can be enjoyed without the book and I hope that they stand as a chronological survey of important works in the history of electronic music. Be sure to tune-in to other episodes of the podcast where we explore a wide range of electronic music in many styles and genres, all drawn from my archive of vintage recordings.
There is a complete playlist for this episode on the website for the podcast.
Let’s get started with the listening guide to Chapter 26, Early Computer Music (1950–70). from my book Electronic and Experimental music.
Playlist: EARLY COMPUTER MUSIC (1950–70)
Time
Track Time
Start
Introduction –Thom Holmes
01:40
00:00
1. Tones from Australia, 1951. All produced using the CSIR Mark 1 computer built at the CSIR’s radio-physics division in Sydney. The computer had a speaker—or hooter—to signal when operations were completed. A clever programmer thought of manipulating the signal tones into a melody.
02:18
01:42
2. Alan Turing’s computer music. 1951. Recording made of tones generated by the mainframe computer at the Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester, England. Snippets of the tunes God Save the King, Baa, Baa Black Sheep, and Glenn Miller’s swing classic In the Mood. Plus, the voices of computer lab members listening to the sound as it was recorded. Original acetate recording from 1951 restored by University of Canterbury composer Jason Long and Prof Jack Copeland.
01:55
02:36
3. Max Mathews, “Numerology” (1960). Introduced by a narrator. From the album Music From Mathematics, Bell Telephone Laboratories. While working at Bell Labs in telecommunications research, Max Mathews was one of the earliest computer engineers to use a general-purpose computer to program music and digitally synthesize musical sound. His programming language Music I allowed composers to design their own virtual instruments, a breakthrough during those pioneering days of computer music. “Numerology” was composed to demonstrate the various parameters, or building blocks, available to the composer using this programming language: vibrato (frequency modulation), attack and decay characteristics, glissando, tremolo (amplitude modulation), and the creation of new waveshapes.
02:49
04:38
4. John Robinson Pierce, “Beat Canon” (1960). Introduced by a narrator. From the album Music From Mathematics, Bell Telephone Laboratories. Played by IBM computer and direct to digital sound transducer.
00:52
07:28
5. James Tenney, “Noise Study” (1961). So named because “each of the ‘instruments’ used in this piece includes a noise-generator.”
04:24
08:20
6. “Bicycle Built For Two (Accompanied)” (1963) From the demonstration record Computer Speech - Hee Saw Dhuh Kaet (He Saw The Cat), produced by Bell Laboratories. This recording contains samples of synthesized speech–speech artificially constructed from the basic building blocks of the English language.
01:17
12:42
7. Lejaren Hiller, “Computer Cantata, Prologue to Strophe III” (1963). From the University Of Illinois. This work employed direct computer synthesis using an IBM 7094 mainframe computer and the Musicomp programming language.
05:41
14:00
8. J. K. Randall, “Lyric Variations For Violin And Computer” (1965-1968). J. K. Randall’s piece had a complex section that pushed the limits of computer processing power at the time. Although the section consisted of only 12 notes, each note was 20 seconds long. Each note overlapped with the next for 10 seconds, making the total length of the section only about 2 minutes. But this required 9 hours to process on one of the fastest computers of the day.
03:34
19:40
9. John Robinson Pierce, “Eight-Tone Canon” (1966). “Using the computer, one can produce tones with overtones at any frequencies.” Produced at Bell Telephone Laboratories.
03:53
23:14
10. Pietro Grossi, “Mixed Paganini” (1967). “Transcription for the central processor unit of a GE-115 computer of short excerpts of Paganini music scores. Realized at Studio di Fonologia musicale di Firenze (Italy).
01:46
27:08
11. Pietro Grossi, “Permutation of Five Sounds” (1967). Recording made on the Italian General Electric label. Realized at Studio di Fonologia musicale di Firenze (Italy). Distributed in 1967 as a New year gift by Olivetti company.
01:33
28:54
12. Wayne Slawson, “Wishful Thinking About Winter” (1970). Produced at Bell Telephone Laboratories.
03:53
30:26
13. John Cage and Lejaren Hiller, “HPSCHD” excerpt (1967-1969). The piece was written for Harpsichords and Computer-Generated Sound Tapes. Hiller and Cage staged a lively public performance in 1968 at the University of Illinois in Urbana. The first 10,000 individual recordings came with an insert in the form of a computer printout insert designed to allow the listener to program their own performance. And I quote from the jacket: "The computer-output sheet included in this album is one of 10,000 different numbered solutions of the program KNOBS. It enables the listener who follows its instructions to become a performer of this recording of HPSCHD. Preparation of this material was made possible through the Computing Center of the State University of New York at Buffalo." I happen to have three copies of this album, each with the printout.
07:20
34:16
14. Jean-Claude Risset, “Computer Suite From "Little Boy" (1968). Realized at Bell Laboratories.
04:28
41:46
15. Peter Zinovieff, “January Tensions” (1968). Zinovieff’s notes, from the album: “Computer composed and performed. This piece is very much for computer both in its realization and composition. The rules are straightforward. The computer may begin by improvising slowly on whatever material is first chooses. However, once the initial choices are made then these must influence the whole of the rest of the composition. The original sounds must occasionally be remembered and illustrated but a more and more rigid structure is imposed on the randomness. The piece was electronically realized and composed in real time by an 8K PDP8/S and electronic music peripherals.”
09:48
46:12
16. Barry Vercoe, “Synthesism” (1969). Realized in the Computer Centers of Columbia and Princeton Universities using MUSIC 360 for the IBM 360 mainframe computer. Vercoe authored this musical programming language.
04:33
56:00
17. Charles Dodge, “The Earth’s Magnetic Field” excerpt (1970). Composer Charles Dodge helped close the gap between computer music and other electronic music practices in 1969– 70 by working on computer code at Princeton University and then traveling to Bell Labs to have the code synthesized by a mainframe computer. The work, “Earth’s Magnetic Field” (1970) was an outcome of this process. Dodge realized this piece by fusing computer composition with synthesis, one of the earliest examples of a practice that would become the norm many years later but that was quite difficult at the time. He used a “general- purpose sound synthesis program” written by Godfrey Winham at Princeton University. Every sound in the piece was computed into digital form using the IBM/ 360 model 91 at the Columbia University Computer Center and then converted into analog form at the Bell Telephone Laboratories.
07:45
01:00:32
18. Irv Teibel, "Tintinnabulation (Contemplative Sound)" from Environments (New Concepts In Stereo Sound) (Disc 2) (1970 Syntonic Research). One side of the record is a rare work of purely electronic computer music in a series that otherwise consisted of natural ambient sounds. It used computer-generated bell sounds, falling back on Teibel’s experience processing sounds on an IBM 360 mainframe computer at Bell Labs. The record was promoted for meditation. A sticker on the cover read, "A Sensitizer for the Mind." From the liner notes: “As an illustration of the possibilities currently under examination, Syntonic Research decided to experiment with bell sounds as an environmental sound source. . . . Tintinnabulation can be played at any speed, from 78 to 16 rpm, in full stereo. At different speeds, the sounds change in tone and apparent size, although the harmonics remain unchanged. The effect, unlike real bells, is fully controllable by the use of your volume, bass, and treble controls.”
30:10
01:08:16
Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes.
My Books/eBooks: Electronic and Experimental Music, sixth edition, Routledge 2020. Also, Sound Art: Concepts and Practices, first edition, Routledge 2022.
See my companion blog that I write for the Bob Moog Foundation.
For a transcript, please see my blog, Noise and Notations.
Original music by Thom Holmes can be found on iTunes and Bandcamp.
