The recording of computer music made by Alan Turing was restored.

Turing reads a book (Source: REX / Shutterstock)



Specialists from New Zealand have announced the successful restoration of the recording, which recently turned 65 years old. This is a computer-generated sequence of famous melodies that Alan Turing recorded in 1951. Yes, this is exactly the Turing who cracked the code of the Nazi encryption machine . Audio recording made by Turing, was the first of hundreds of thousands of tracks that were created using computers many years later.



Scientists from the University of Canterbury believe that Alan Turing was not only a brilliant mathematician and cryptographer. He was also a pioneer in the world of computer music.



“The innovative work of Alan Turing on turning a computer into a musical instrument has not received due attention,” say Jack Copeland and Jason Long. The computer system, turned by Turing into a music device, occupied a substantial part of the basement of the Computing Machine Laboratory (Manchester, England). This system was able to play just a few tunes, including the anthem of Great Britain , “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” and Glenn Miller’s In the Mood.

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Jack Copland and Jason Long



Turing synthesized music using the Mark II Manchester computer. Sometimes during the execution of operations, the computer generated sound. According to Turing, the sound was like a dial tone. For this reason, the sound is called hoot (English - long beep). In fact, the sound consisted of a series of discrete sounds of short duration. They repeated continuously, and the person heard just a horn, close in pitch to the “Do” of the third octave.



Constantly listening to the sounds of the big machine, Turing decided to try to program the “Mark II” so that he played music. Rather, the goal was somewhat different - the scientist wanted the computer to communicate sound with certain data to operators. According to Turing, this could facilitate the work of the Mark II team.





Alan Turing (right) looks at the Mark II console (Source: University of Manchester School of Computer Science)



In 1951, school teacher Christopher Strachey, with the help of the Turing guide, programmed the system to play three popular music tracks overnight. Thanks to this, the teacher became an operator: Turing invited him to work in his computer lab. Strachey had previously recalled that Turing had left the car at full disposal and left. The school teacher, who knew how to play the piano very well, was given the opportunity to work independently with the most complicated system of that time.



“I sat behind the control panel of this giant machine and saw five rows with 20 switches in each. There were some other things there, and the room was more like a cabin of a warship, ”says Strachey. For the first time in their lives, a young computer lover managed to work with a computer for so long.





Streychi sunbathes in his garden (Source: Bodleian Library and Camphill Village Trust)



You can listen to the restored audio here .



Programming "Mark" to play sounds, and even more so, whole melodies is not an easy task.



"Mark II" - one of the first models of electronic computer systems with the ability to store data in RAM. The size of the computer was large: about 17 meters in length. The whole system weighed several tons. But it was already the second version, where instead of the step finders it used very fast low-power relays (about 13,000 units). The system reads the instructions from the paper tape, followed by the execution of the command. On the tape fit program, which could decipher only eight instructions.



Music Turing recorded on the acetate plate size of 12 inches. This is an aluminum disc coated with acetate lacquer. When university professor Jack Copland and composer Jason Long tested the record, they found the record was distorted. “The recording frequency was wrong. Therefore, the listener could not get a complete picture of how computer-generated music actually sounded, ”says Copland. It was only possible to correct the situation with the use of modern computer systems. I had to change the speed of sound reproduction, muffle noises and improve the sound quality.



Most likely, experts say, the record was distorted during the application of the track on the plate. The disc on which the disc lay rotated too quickly, and therefore such problems arose. When playing a recording, in addition to music, voices are also heard. Someone laughs and says a few phrases, mentioning that the car is not in the mood.



“We really enjoyed it when we heard the real sound reproduced by the computer on which Turing worked,” said the authors of the project to restore the recording.