Computer audio:

Past vs Present

Maximilian Wingenbach
The audio of the first Computer

The first time a musical melody was played with a computer was in 1951 at Alan Turing’s
computing machine laboratory in Manchester. It is the first known computer-generated
music/sounds. The melody played was “God Save the Queen”. The computer model was a
CSIRAC. First Computer Generated sounds.
Audio in current Computers

To create sound, computers use oscillator circuits. They vibrate to produce sounds. Audio hasn’t
actually improved much since the first computer but microphones are now able to produce
louder sounds and are in a position where it is easier to hear them. The biggest innovation to
computer audio is that computers are now able to record audio.
CSIRAC

The CSIRAC (originally called CSIR Mark 1) was created by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard in
the late 1940’s. A mathematician named Geoff Hills programmed the CSIRAC to play popular
instrumental music from the early 1950’s.

Trevor Pearcey

Geoff Hills
How CSIRAC makes sound

The CSIRAC had numbers placed in specific memory locations in such a way that when they
were read out and sent to the speaker, they had become pulses with a predetermined period.
This created a calculated pitch which produced musical melodies.
Recording audio

Modern computers have the ability to record audio unlike the CSIRAC. This is done by
converting pressure variations into an electric potential with amplitude corresponding to the
intensity of the pressure. The computer then processes it with a technique called sampling.
The End