Paul Doornbusch - 麻省理工学院人工智能研究专业

Paul Doornbusch
RMIT University
GPO Box 2476V
墨尔本 3001, 澳大利亚
pauld@iii.rmit.edu.au

Computer Sound
Synthesis in 1951:
The Music of CSIRAC

The Australian-built ‘‘automatic computer’’ ini-
tially known as the CSIR Mk1, and later known as
CSIRAC, was one of the world’s earliest stored-
program electronic digital computers (威廉姆斯
1997). (见图 1.) Coincidentally, it may also
have been the ﬁrst computer to play music, 甚至
though later work done elsewhere in the 1950s is
clearly the origin of computer music as we know
the ﬁeld today.

Developed in Sydney in the late 1940s by the

Council for Scientiﬁc and Industrial Research
(CSIR), the CSIR Mk1 ran its ﬁrst program in No-
十一月 1949. Geoff Hill, a mathematician and
Australia’s ﬁrst real software engineer, 亲-
grammed the CSIR Mk1 to play popular musical
melodies through its loudspeaker starting in 1951,
如果不 1950. The CSIR Mk1 was moved to the Uni-
versity of Melbourne in June 1955 and renamed
CSIRAC (McCann and Thorne 2000). It performed
useful and trailblazing service there until 1964.
During CSIRAC’s time in Melbourne, the mathe-
matics professor Thomas Cherry programmed it to
perform music, developing a system and program
such that anyone who understood standard musical
notation could create a punched-paper data tape for
CSIRAC to perform that music.

Although the music performed by the CSIR Mk1

may seem crude and unremarkable compared to
the most advanced musical developments of the
时间, and especially to what is possible now, 这是
probably the ﬁrst music in the world to be per-
formed on a computer, and the means of produc-
tion lay at the leading edge of technological
sophistication at that time. These ﬁrst steps of us-
ing a computer in a musical sense occurred in iso-
关系, but they are still interesting, 因为
leap of imagination in using the ﬂexibility of a
general-purpose computer to create music and the
programming ingenuity required to achieve it are
signiﬁcant. CSIRAC took some initial steps in that
方向.

电脑音乐杂志, 28:1, PP. 10–25, 春天 2004
(西德:1) 2004 麻省理工学院.

An Overview of CSIRAC

In the 1940s, modern physics had advanced to such
a stage that the calculations required were enor-
mous, manifold, and tedious. To address this prob-
莱姆, calculating machines had been developed,
such as the ‘‘linear equations machine,’’ the ‘‘dif-
ferential analyzer,’’ and the ‘‘multi-register ac-
counting machine.’’ However, these calculating
machines still required much human intervention,
so there was a desire to build an automatic calcula-
tor with some sort of memory to store the data and
also the instructions of what to do with the data.
Two major technological advances of the time al-
lowed the realization of an automatic calculator
with memory. One was the thermionic valve (这
vacuum tube), which was used as a switching de-
vice or as an electronic relay. The other was mer-
cury delay-line ‘‘memory,’’ which had been used in
radar systems during World War II. This memory
system could be adapted for use in an automatic
calculator.

The CSIR Radiophysics division was active dur-
第二次世界大战, developing portable radar systems
for Australian servicemen for jungle warfare. 在
1941, Maston Beard joined the Radiophysics Labo-
拉拉托, 在哪里, with Trevor Pearcey, he was instru-
mental in the development of Australia’s ﬁrst
电脑. This work was undertaken by the Radi-
ophysics Laboratory as they were the leading ex-
perts in pulse technology and valve electronics
(McCann and Thorne 2000).

Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard ofﬁcially began

the ‘‘Electronic Computer’’ project in 1947. (铝-
though the terms ‘‘electronic computer’’ and ‘‘auto-
matic computer’’ may seem tautological today, 在
the 1940s to 1950s, the term ‘‘computer’’ typically
denoted a secretary who operated a calculating ma-
chine.) 此外, in the same year the University
of Pennsylvania published previously secret details
of the computer known as ENIAC. In mid 1948,
Pearcey completed and published the fundamental
logical design of the computer in two papers. 这

电脑音乐杂志

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数字 1. CSIRAC as dis-
played for its 50th birthday
celebration, Museum Victo-
ria, 25 十一月 1999. 笔记
the speaker near the bottom
of the right-hand door of the
console.

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overriding considerations of the logical design were
engineering and programming simplicity, as this
was intended to be a comprehensive prototype for a
larger and more capable machine. The construction
开始于 1948. The ﬁrst program, which simply
multiplied two numbers, was run late in 1949,
probably in November, but nobody recorded the ex-
act date. Trevor Pearcey recalls, ‘‘We all shouted
‘Hooray!’ and went back to work’’ (Pearcey 1996).
The CSIR Mk1 was very different from today’s
computers because it was a serial machine. 数据
were sent around the computer from ‘‘sources’’ to
‘‘destinations,’’ one bit at a time. Modern comput-
ers typically move 32 或者 64 bits in parallel. 这
CSIR Mk1’s serial architecture had consequences
for programming the machine, and it was espe-
cially signiﬁcant for timing-critical programs such
as those that may play music in real time.

It is important to appreciate that all operations
were considered as serial transfers of numbers, 或者
数据, from a ‘‘source’’ to a ‘‘destination.’’ A source
could be something like a register, a memory loca-
的, or the accumulator. A destination could be a
memory location, a register, the paper tape punch,

or the loudspeaker. Each 20-bit digital word was
partitioned into a 5-bit destination, a 5-bit source,
and a 10-bit data address.

During the transfer, the data could undergo

转型, such as being subtracted or added.
The ten-bit data address, if it applied to the main
(mercury delay-line) storage was further subdivided
into two ﬁve-bit components: one to select which
mercury delay line the data were in and another to
select the position, or ‘‘time,’’ of the data in that
delay line (院长 1997). As the memory was a recir-
culating delay line and the machine architecture
was serial, it was necessary for a program to wait
until a particular memory location was available
for reading. Two 1-msec major-cycles was the min-
imum time to execute an instruction, but if an op-
portunity was missed to access a memory address,
then it could take 3 msec or 4 毫秒. This variable
timing of instructions and memory access was
critical to some applications, such as producing a
repeatable sound, and this is the key to understand-
ing how the music was produced. Each memory
tube was a delay line, so the data in each position
in a memory tube required a different time to ac-

Doornbusch

桌子 1. Facts and Figures Regarding the
CSIRAC Computer

Architecture

Number of Tubes
Power Consumption
大量的
Physical Dimensions
记忆

Disk Storage
Clock Frequency
Speed

Serial architecture; recirculating
acoustic delay-line memory

超过 2000
30,000 watts
7000 kg
45 square meters
768 words of main memory

(one storage ‘‘word’’ (西德:2) 二
bytes)
2048 字
0.001 MHz (1 千赫)
0.0005 MIPS (500 operations/

秒)

过程. It was possible to calculate this time and
determine how long after the start of a clock or ac-
cess cycle the data were read. Numbers were placed
in speciﬁc memory locations in such a way that
when they were read out and sent to the loud-
speaker, they were pulses with a pre-determined
时期. 这样, a predictable pitch was produced
and used to create musical melodies (Ryan 2000).
桌子 1 summarizes several facts and ﬁgures re-
garding the CSIRAC computer, 和图 2 节目
a diagram of the CSIR Mk1 architecture as it was
originally conceived, 加州. 1947 (院长 1997). 更多的
detail about the architecture, 建造, 和
technicalities of CSIRAC can be found online at
www.cs.mu.oz.au/csirac.

The Loudspeaker

In common with several other ﬁrst-generation
电脑, the CSIR Mk1 had a built-in loud-
speaker. The Ferranti Mark I, derived from the
Manchester Mark I, had a loudspeaker, 和, 喜欢
CSIRAC, played some very early music, as recorded
in the British National Sound Archive on the tape
with archive number H3942. Although I have seen
no documentation about the Ferranti Mark I’s
means of producing music, this tape sounds very
similar to the sounds produced by CSIRAC (符合-
ing to Burton 2000).

The CSIR Mk 1’s loudspeaker, or ‘‘hooter’’ as it

was called, was an output device used by

programmers to signal that a particular event had
been reached in the program. It was commonly
used for warnings, often to signify the end of the
program and sometimes as a debugging aid. 和
many of the earliest computers, owing to the lack
of visual feedback (there was no display as is cus-
tomary today), it was common to include a ‘‘hoot’’
instruction at the end of a program to signal that it
had ended, or elsewhere if a signal was needed for
the operator.

The loudspeaker on the CSIR Mk1 was built into

the computer in such a way that it was a destina-
tion for data, effectively on a register of the ma-
中国, and it received the raw pulse data off the
‘‘bus’’ (院长 1997). This worked to create some
sort of sound, but it required more effort to accom-
plish a stable, pitched sound out of it as a single
pulse would barely make an audible click. 那里-
fore, multiple pulses would be required to achieve
an audible result, possibly as several in-line ‘‘P’’
statements or as a short loop of instructions. 这
timing of the loop would have caused a change in
the frequency of the sound from the ‘‘hooter.’’ Any
programmer with an interest in sound or music
would immediately see the potential available.
The sequence of instructions could look like

这, 例如:

start of note
set counter to N
loop start, send pulse in memory

location M1 to speaker

wait time t1
send pulse in memory location M2 to

speaker

wait time t1
send pulse in memory location M3 to

speaker

wait time t2
send pulse in memory location M4 to

speaker

wait time t3
send pulse in memory location M5 to

speaker

decrement N
if N equal to 0 then exit, else return

to loop start
end of note

电脑音乐杂志

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数字 2. Diagram of the
CSIR Mk1 architecture as
originally conceived, 加州.
1947.

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Music and Technology in the Time of CSIRAC

It is useful to place the activities of the CSIR Mk1
in historical context. There was signiﬁcant activity
in electronic music before the development of the
CSIR Mk1 and prior to more experimental and ad-
venturous musical developments after World War II.
例如, the telharmonium, Theremin, spha¨ ro-
phon, dynaphone, ondes martenot, and trautonium
achieved enduring reputations because major com-
posers wrote works for them. All of them were ca-
pable of monophonic melodic output, but most of
them were short-lived and were mostly used to per-
form traditional music. The Hammond organ was a
different and commercially more successful devel-
opment that was also used largely in a musically
traditional manner (Chadabe 1997; Ernst 1977;
曼宁 1993).

There were other developments at this time that
used electronics and that took a fresh and less mu-

sically restrictive approach to both sounds and mu-
sic itself. 例如, Hugh Le Caine’s ‘‘Coded
Music Apparatus’’ (1952) allowed the control of
sound synthesis by ﬁve curves, one each for pitch
and amplitude and three for timbre (Chadabe 1997).
相似地, Percy Grainger wrote Free Music for
multiple Theremins and developed his own elec-
tronic musical instruments with the assistance of
Burnett Cross (Bird 1999). 然而, most early
electronic musical instruments were used to play
electronic renditions of standard repertoire and not
to create new music.

The real history and legacy of electronic music

comes from developments about the same time
that CSIRAC was being planned and built, 反对
the background of the great artistic expansion after
World War II. Against this background and with a
spirit of freedom, reconstruction, and liberation
that many artists felt after World War II, electronic
music blossomed. In the ﬁeld of electronic music,
there were the two signiﬁcant emerging develop-

Doornbusch

评论: musique concre` te and analog electronic
音乐. 此外, John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Ed-
gard Vare` se, and others were writing advanced in-
strumental music, developing new composition
theories and certainly becoming interested in elec-
tronic music (Cage 1967). It is against this back-
地面, but in isolation, that CSIRAC ﬁrst played
音乐.

Computer music developed quickly in other ar-
eas where composers were involved from the early
developments. These developments took place at
about the same time as Thomas Cherry developed
his parameterized Music Programme for CSIRAC.
The ﬁeld of computer music at that time included
two main streams of activity: computer-assisted
composition and sound synthesis (曼宁 1993).
Computer-assisted composition (for traditional mu-
sical instruments, initially) developed from the
early work of Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson,
which started late in 1955 at the University of Illi-
nois (Hiller and Isaacson 1959). Other composers
quickly followed this work with developments of
their own. In Paris from about 1957, Iannis Xenakis
developed music programs that modeled his com-
positional processes, which used statistics and
probability theory to choose musical parameters
(Chadabe 1997; Roads 1996). Similar work was un-
dertaken nearby a few years later by Pierre Barbaud
and Roger Blanchard at Compagnie des Machines
Bull, the French computer company (爬坡道 2000;
曼宁 1993).

In the early to mid 1960s in England, 斯坦利

Gill, D. Champernowne, 和D. Papworth were fol-

lowing comparable objectives. In Germany and the
Netherlands during this time (从 1964), 戈特弗里德
Michael Koenig was developing his computer com-
position program Project 1. 在 1957, at about the
same time as the Illiac Suite, Max Mathews at Bell
Laboratories was developing his Music I program,
which produced completed music as a digital audio
ﬁle that was played back with a digital-to-analog
converter (Pierce 1995). 经过 1959 and with the help
of composers, this work had evolved to allow tim-
bral variation and modiﬁcation of the sounds
through sound synthesis.

For computing, 然而, it is not as simple to
put activities into historical context as it would at
ﬁrst seem. There is a problem of deﬁnition: 什么
combination of hardware and software capabilities
constitutes a computer? Konrad Zuse created some
early electromechanical calculators. His Z3 of 1941
(using relays) has been called the ﬁrst electrome-
chanical programmable digital computer. Alan Tur-
ing’s Colossus, which was operational in 1943, 有
been called the ﬁrst all-electronic programmable
calculator as it had no memory and was driven by a
punched paper tape. ENIAC was designed as a cal-
culator but was later given programmable control
(威廉姆斯 1997). 然而, if one accepts the de-
ﬁnition of a digital computer as an all-electronic
device capable of calculating and branching opera-
系统蒸发散, where the data and instructions are held in
rewritable memory, then the following series of
events shown in Table 2 is a guide to when the
ﬁrst all-electronic digital computers ﬁrst ran test
节目.

桌子 2. A Brief Guide Outlining When the First All-Electronic Digital
Computers Ran Their First Test Programs

日期

机器

Institution

六月 1948
可能 1949
八月 1949
九月 1949
十一月 1949
可能 1950
可能 1950

MADM
EDSAC
Binac
Harvard Mark III
CSIR Mk1
Pilot ACE
SEAC

Manchester University
剑桥大学
Electronic Control Company
哈佛大学
CSIR Radiophysics
National Physics Laboratory
National Bureau of Standards

国家

英国
英国
美国
美国
澳大利亚
英国
美国

电脑音乐杂志

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When CSIRAC Played Music

There is a body of evidence that points to the CSIR
Mk1 playing music in the very early 1950s. 这
largely comes from anecdotal sources, 这不是
surprising as it was an unofﬁcial activity. This situ-
ation may change, as various other items of impor-
tance have been uncovered over the last several
年. Doug McCann is the main historian who has
studied CSIRAC and who has interviewed the
original personnel involved with the project. 他
recalls hearing about the music:

gey,’’ and one or two other things like that. . . .
I had suggested that we record the tunes and
get Frank Legg . . . to play it over the radio.
然而, 博士. Bowen, who was then chief, 做过
not think this was good enough. I think he
didn’t realize the intellectual skill and effort
that had gone into actually getting the ma-
chine to play speciﬁc musical sequences. 这
was in 1950 or ’51; I cannot give a precise date.
It was certainly a very early programming exer-
cise. We played it at the conference. (Pearcey
1996)

I was particularly interested in ascertaining if
and when CSIRAC had played music. We ques-
tioned [Trevor] Pearcey about it. Pearcey was
very lucid and said he clearly remembered it
playing music in 1951. He tried to recall if it
was any earlier than that because he said the
computer started doing regular work in 1950
sometime. He said it deﬁnitely played music
在八月 1951 at the ﬁrst Australian Com-
puter Conference, and that it had ﬁrst played it
some time before that.

Pearcey tried to give us a deﬁnite event to
date it from and he was ﬁrm about the Austra-
lian Computer Conference. He did not appear
to be the sort of person to exaggerate; 如果有的话-
thing he was more likely to be conservative in
his estimations for the sake of accuracy. If he
was not sure of something he would say so.
There was no hesitation in his assertions that
the computer played music, at the latest, 在
八月 1951. He was just not sure how he
could date it any earlier. He said it was an
early programming exercise and suggested it
was ﬁrst done sometime in 1950. (McCann
2000)

A fragment of the videotaped interview with Tre-
vor Pearcey, which occurred several years after the
one just recalled by Doug McCann, is transcribed
以下:

I believe CSIRAC was a very early machine to
provide tones through a loudspeaker . . . 我们
played ‘‘Girl with Flaxen Hair,’’ ‘‘Colonel Bo-

Sadly, most of the people who were associated
with the early days of the computer are no longer
living, including Trevor Pearcey, Maston Beard,
Geoff Hill, and Frank Legg, a radio announcer who
was apparently willing to broadcast the music.
然而, some other people can verify that the
CSIR Mk1 ﬁrst played music in 1951. Reg Ryan,
who started with the project in 1948, can recall the
music at the 1951 conference: ‘‘I can remember it
playing music at the public opening, the confer-
恩斯, 1951 I think it was. I can’t recall if it played
music before that, it must have done so but I can’t
recall it now’’ (Ryan 2000).

This is a fair corroboration that the CSIR Mk1
publicly played music at the ﬁrst Conference of
Automatic Computing Machines at Sydney Univer-
sity on 7–9 August 1951, but there is a little more
information to back this up. Dick McGee, WHO
started with the CSIR in April 1951, also remem-
bers the music from that time:

I can remember hearing the music soon after I
started there. It was something simple they
played. Something like ‘‘Twinkle Twinkle’’ I
思考. Anyway, I can remember that it was
1951, because I started in April. I went to one
or two lectures at the conference. I don’t re-
member the event where they played the mu-
sic—they must have walked everybody over to
the other building—but I can remember them
talking about it soon after the conference, 如何
surprised everyone was and so on. (McGee
2000)

Doornbusch

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Geoff Hill’s Master of Science thesis from The
University of Sydney, dated March 1954, mentions
the music of the CSIR Mk1 on page 63: ‘‘Extension
to semantic analysis of language has led to design
of ‘language-translation’ programmes. Sub-routines
generating notes of the chromatic scale by sending
pulses to a loud speaker [原文如此] can be used in an in-
terpretive programme for playing music from a
coded score. . . . [时间]he techniques of music and
‘translation’ programmes were adapted as the basis
of the powerful interpretive approach to compli-
cated arithmetic’’ (爬坡道 1954).

In addition to this, Ron Bowles (a CSIR Mk1
maintenance engineer) has examined the Sydney
music punched paper tape and can establish the
date for it as the ﬁrst half of 1953. This is mostly
owing to the particular type of tape reader needed
for this tape, as the input and output devices on the
computer changed several times. There are also
other speciﬁcs of the machine, 例如, 监狱-
mary program or bootstrap loader and the imple-
mentation or detailed workings of some
instructions, which varied from time to time and
are therefore useful in dating programs. 有
nine musical items on the Sydney music tape from
early 1953. Each of these would have taken a con-
siderable time to program. Given this and the sec-
ondary priority of the music, then it would suggest
that the earliest items on this tape would have ex-
isted a signiﬁcant amount of time before 1953
(鲍尔斯 2000).

Taking into account all of the corroborating evi-
登塞, it is reasonable to accept the recollections of
Trevor Pearcey, Reg Ryan, and Dick McGee that
the CSIR Mk1 did publicly play music in the ﬁrst
week of August in 1951. It must have been playing
music for some period before that notable date, 但
it is impossible to accurately determine a date for
that now.

In Melbourne, circa 1957, Thomas Cherry wrote

a music program that extended the pitch and dy-
namic range possible with the machine. 先生. Cherry
generalized the structure of the music program
such that it could accept a data tape of note pitch
and duration data. With some simple instructions,
someone could produce a data tape of some music
so that it could be played by CSIRAC. 特里

Holden, Ron Bowles, and Kay Thorne are the main
source of the date for this. They say that it could
have been late in 1956 that Mr. Cherry ﬁrst had
recognizable music coming from the machine, 但
it was most likely in 1957 (鲍尔斯 2000; Holden
1997; K. Thorne 2000). The written records have
only a little information that can date the work.
先生. Cherry used a form of notation in his private
notes that was not used after 1958, so this supports
the memories of Kay Thorne, Ron Bowles, 和
Terry Holden. In addition to this, a little support
can be gleaned from the fact that Mr. Cherry used
the Melbourne 12-hole paper tape exclusively, 作为
CSIRAC had 5-hole equipment attached later, 在
about the middle of its service in Melbourne. 这
points to early work on the computer in Mel-
bourne, as do Mr. Cherry’s activities, because he
was programming only very early in the Melbourne
时期, after which his duties were in administra-
的.

The Music

As mentioned, the CSIR Mk1 had a ‘‘hooter’’ cir-
cuit that could be programmed to produce a vari-
able frequency by sending pulses to the speaker
at varying rates. It was a small step, 然后, to imag-
ine that if one could control this process, then a
controlled pitch would be the result. 第一个
programmers of the CSIR Mk1 were Geoff Hill and
Trevor Pearcey. Geoff Hill had perfect pitch and
came from a musical family; both his mother and
sister taught music throughout their lives (爬坡道
2000). Geoff Hill was the ﬁrst person to program
the CSIR Mk1 to play a musical melody. 最初,
this was probably as a programming exercise and
for his own interest.

The sound-production technique used on the
CSIR Mk1 was as crude as is possible to imagine
on a computer. The raw pulses of the computer’s
data words, the bit stream pulses, were sent di-
rectly to an audio ampliﬁer with a loudspeaker at-
tached. 然而, it is also worth remembering that
this occurred when there was no such thing as
digital-to-analog converters for playback, no tech-
niques for working with digital audio, and little in

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the way of a complete theory of digital audio. 在广告中-
迪迪, the CSIR Mk1 produced music in real-time,
which was necessary to overcome the limitation of
the lack of mass storage. There was nothing such
as magnetic computer tape to store digitized audio.
There were enormous timing subtleties of the com-
puter and sound generation process to be under-
stood and addressed to achieve a stable,
pre-determined frequency output.

This work took place in isolation and without
prior example, eventually for the purpose of public
demonstration and entertainment, but initially it
was probably a personal interest. It was also possi-
bly used as a signiﬁcant programming challenge be-
cause of the timing and programming intricacies
that needed to be negotiated. Engineers, not com-
posers, undertook this musical endeavor, 所以
musical implications of the computer were not
fully explored. Signiﬁcant advances in computer
sound generation theory and practice would have
to wait for some further technical developments
and the work of Max Mathews at Bell Telephone
Laboratories (Roads 1980, 1996). John Pierce, WHO
at the time was executive director of the Commu-
nication Sciences division at Bell Labs, said that
there were computers making music with ‘‘buzzes
and squawks’’ before the work of Max Mathews
(Mathews 2000; Pierce 1995). Although it was little
reported at the time, the CSIR Mk1 was one of
这些.

The musical pieces played by the CSIR Mk1, 是-

ing popular tunes of the day, are not as musically
signiﬁcant as they might have been had composers
been involved in creating the music. The achieve-
ment is important owing to the imagination of the
practitioners, who conceived of using the ﬂexibility
of a digital computer to make music, and owing to
the ingenuity required of the programmers to de-
vise means to produce sounds from the computer.
It is difﬁcult to appreciate now just how skillful
these people were. Only two of the best
programmers were able to program the CSIR Mk1
to play music. Overcoming the technical issues in
spite of a lack of prior practice to work from shows
the ingenuity and skill that were needed to com-
plete the task. Several people commented that
when they ﬁrst heard the music in the 1950s, 它

was perceived as something magical; it was ‘‘aston-
ishing.’’

Thomas Cherry, in Melbourne, programmed CSI-

RAC to play music, and he also wrote some of the
main arithmetic routines in the software library.
The methods he adopted in the programming were
modiﬁcations of Geoff Hill’s practice in Sydney,
and the range of notes and dynamics was extended.
Hardware changes, providing speedier instructions,
allowed the programming of some notes to extend
the range. 先生. Cherry also designed the structure of
the music program and generalized it such that it
could accept a data tape of note pitch and duration
数据.

The generalization of playing music with the
computer was probably the most signiﬁcant contri-
bution by Mr. Cherry to computer music practice
with CSIRAC. In about 1957, he wrote a music per-
formance program that would allow a computer
user who understood simple standard music nota-
tion to enter it easily into CSIRAC for perfor-
曼斯, without negotiating all of the timing
problems normally required. The ‘‘Music Pro-
gramme’’ could play music from memory or from
punched paper tape. Playing from tape could allow
playback of very long pieces, too large to ﬁt into
记忆, but the speed of successive notes was
limited by the speed of the paper tape reader. 在
实践, this was a small limitation, as it could
play about ten notes a second. Playing from mem-
ory had the advantage that faster notes could be
played, but the piece could not be large.

This work by Mr. Cherry is comparable to other

computer music research of the time. The Music
Programme, which allowed high-level (numerical)
descriptions of music, has several similarities to
Max Mathews’s work from 1957 on Music I. 先生.
Mathews was working at Bell Labs when he started
his experiments of applying computers to musical
目标. Neither the Music Programme nor Music I
included a variable synthesis component (Roads
1980). The sound synthesis method used on CSI-
RAC was not structured in a way to allow a modi-
ﬁcation of the timbre. 然而, Music I was
designed to output a tape of digital samples that
would be played back later through digital-to-
analog converter hardware, so it would soon in-

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clude a synthesis component (Music II, 在 1958) 到
allow modiﬁcation of the sound waveform, and it
did not need to deal with the problems of real-time
performance of the work. The ability to output
sound ﬁles with Music I and Music II was the re-
sult of several technological advances to which
CSIRAC, being from a previous generation of com-
puting technology, did not have access. To gener-
吃, store, and play back sound ﬁles requires: (1)
on-line mass storage such as magnetic tape that
can store sound ﬁles, (2) digital-to-analog convert-
ers to convert the sound ﬁles to audio, 和 (3) sig-
niﬁcant electronic memory capacity. 这
high-level, numerical speciﬁcation for musical pa-
rameters was important for both Mr. Mathews’s
Music I and Mr. Cherry’s Music Programme. 它是
also probably a natural step from other music tech-
nology such as punched paper tape or rolls for con-
trol of player pianos; 然而, it implies a degree
of sophistication in the software to generalize the
input data. The use of digital sound ﬁles was sig-
niﬁcant for Music I and later developments because
it allowed for arbitrary timbral variation. 因此,
Music II (1958) was capable of four independent
parts with any of 16 timbres. This is an order-of-
magnitude improvement over not being able to
modify a timbre, although it did force a non real-
time approach owing to the limits of computing
力量 (Roads 1980). According to Max Mathews,
composers’ requirements drove these develop-
评论. The more recent developments of the ‘‘Mu-
sic N’’ languages, for example Csound, 没有
achieve real-time output until about 1990; such is
the processing power required. 然而, given all
of the foregoing, the real signiﬁcance of the work at
Bell Labs were the concepts of the ‘‘unit generator’’
that was introduced in 1960 with Music III and the
‘‘stored function,’’ or ‘‘function table,’’ oscillator.
Both Mr. Cherry’s Music Programme and Mr.
Mathews’s Music I allowed a similar high-level and
numerical speciﬁcation of musical events. 如何-
曾经, what the Music Programme lost in timbral
manipulation it made up for with real-time perfor-
mance of a piece of music and limited run-time
transposition (set via a register on the console) 和
tempo variation of the piece.

Music Reconstruction

When I ﬁrst heard that CSIRAC played music in
1951, I was in disbelief. 然而, after a few elec-
tronic mail messages and discussions with some of
the people previously mentioned, I became very cu-
rious. I hatched a plan to reconstruct the music,
with the support of Peter Thorne and the Univer-
sity of Melbourne, but I was worried because I had
no idea how to actually achieve this.

The music played by CSIRAC was unfortunately
never recorded onto any audio storage format such
as tape or disk. Little was known about the music,
and although several people who had heard it in
the 1950s and 1960s were still around to tell the
tales, it was impossible to hear it any more. 如何-
曾经, three key people who would be needed for the
music reconstruction—Ron Bowles, John Spencer,
and Jurij (乔治) Semkiw—were involved with a
project at the University of Melbourne to thor-
oughly document CSIRAC, as it is now a museum
piece and one of the oldest, intact, ﬁrst-generation
computers in the world. CSIRAC’s circuit dia-
克, manuals, and documentation still exist, 作为
does all of its program library, which makes it one
of the best-documented old computers. John Spen-
cer was a programmer on CSIRAC. He not only re-
mains highly skilled with CSIRAC programs, 但
he has also written a very comprehensive emulator
for CSIRAC that runs on a modern personal com-
电脑. Ron Bowles and Jurij Semkiw were CSIRAC
maintenance engineers who have intimate experi-
ence and undocumented knowledge of the internal
workings of the machine. The unique skills of
these three pioneers made the reconstruction of the
music possible.

The ﬁrst step, obviously, was to read the

punched paper tapes of the Sydney and Melbourne
music programs. The format of the CSIRAC
punched paper tapes changed when the machine
was shipped to Melbourne. Reading the program
tapes was not difﬁcult, but it was certainly tedious.
幸运的是, there was a mechanical reader for the
Melbourne tapes that was built by John Horvath of
the University of Melbourne’s computer science
部门. John Spencer was using this to store
the contents of all of the paper tapes, the subrou-

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tine library, ETC。, as PC disk ﬁles, and he also ran
the music program tapes through the reader. 那里
were a few problems, mostly with paper tapes that
had become torn on the edges, as these tended to
tear more and jam as they went through the reader.
The tapes were read multiple times to ensure an
accurate reading. 有, 然而, no auto-
mated reading device for the Sydney paper tape for-
垫, so this was read by hand. John taught me how
去做这个, and we both undertook the task and
compared the results. After a few corrections, 我们
had an accurate reading of the Sydney tape and all
of the music tapes as text ﬁles on a PC.

Somewhere along the way, the idea occurred to
me that we could possibly split the reconstruction
task into two components: (1) reconstructing the
timing of the pulses sent to the speaker and (2) 关于-
constructing the pulse shapes sent to the speaker.
This turned out to be a key approach to solving the
问题. The aim, simply stated, was to reproduce
precisely the pulse stream and thus the sound that
emerged from CSIRAC’s loudspeaker. After some
实验, we discovered that the best
course of action would be to read the program and
data tapes (and get them working in the emulator,
a non-trivial matter), use several programs John
Spencer developed from his emulator to generate
the loudspeaker pulse timing data, reproduce with
hardware the pulse shapes that appeared at the
loudspeaker terminals, and then combine these to
reproduce the pulse stream. This pulse stream
could then be played through a loudspeaker and re-
corded if necessary.

The CSIRAC emulator that had previously been
developed by John Spencer would now be used to
run the music programs. The emulator could not
output sound the way CSIRAC did owing to the
limitations of the PC architecture, and it could not
be modiﬁed to do so. It was decided that the sim-
plest way to proceed was to develop programs from
the emulator core that would write a ﬁle contain-
ing the timing of the loudspeaker pulses. This ﬁle
contained details of when pulses were sent to the
loudspeaker, which pulses were sent, and the inter-
pulse timing details. The core CSIRAC emulator
code was not designed for this, and Ron Bowles
worked extensively with John Spencer to reﬁne the

timing of each instruction in the new program that
would gather the correct timing details of the
pulses sent to the loudspeaker. Ron Bowles still re-
members the precise details of the timings of each
memory location access, the timings of accessing
the various sources and destinations, and their in-
terdependencies. This is crucial information for a
real-time activity, such as playing music, 它是
not documented anywhere with any precision. Ron
Bowles drew up tables of the exact timing of each
memory location access, register access, 并在-
struction, including how that varied with prevail-
ing conditions within the machine. 这
information was then incorporated into the pro-
gram developed from the core code of the emulator
to gather the pulse timing data. After the timing
details were reﬁned, it was a relatively simple mat-
ter to put in place a data ﬁle output for the pulses
being sent to the loudspeaker destination.

While the paper tapes were being read and the
pulse timing programs were being developed, Jurij
Semkiw was designing and building logic circuitry
to reconstruct CSIRAC’s pulse shape. The logic de-
sign allowed the repetition of a single word, 和
the exact timing of the bits as in CSIRAC’s logic
circuits. John Spencer had built an exact reproduc-
tion of the valve output ampliﬁer (including an
original output transformer) based on CSIRAC’s
circuits, and to achieve an accurate pulse shape,
the output was sent through this ampliﬁer with the
same sort of loudspeaker attached that was used on
CSIRAC. Pulses were played at various frequencies
and with all combinations of bits turned on. 这
was checked with an oscilloscope to verify that the
pulse shapes on the output matched the original
pulses generated by CSIRAC according to traces
found in the CSIRAC archive. It was also checked
aurally with a loudspeaker to verify that it sounded
the same as CSIRAC to listeners who remembered
the machine’s sound. This output was recorded
onto a DAT recorder from across the loudspeaker
terminals. The digitized pulses became data struc-
tures in another program, developed by John Spen-
核素, that would read the ﬁle of loudspeaker
pulse-timing data and apply the correct pulses in
the time relationship speciﬁed in the timing ﬁle.
This program wrote an output ﬁle of the pulses at

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数字 3. Oscilloscope
screen image of the recon-
structed speaker pulses.
The four traces are for six
bits on, four bits on, 三
bits on, and one bit on,
from top to bottom.

One further step would provide the greatest au-
thenticity. The original loudspeaker used in CSI-
RAC, a 5-inch Rola model 5C, had a torn paper
cone, so another was found that was in excellent
condition and close in manufacturing serial num-
ber to the original. This loudspeaker was placed in
the CSIRAC console door, and the music was
played through it from a high-ﬁdelity compact disc
player and ampliﬁer with a low output impedance
to exert the minimum inﬂuence on the perceived
sound and the waveform. The output was recorded
to digital audio tape (DAT) with a microphone.
When the sound of this recording is compared to
the digital audio ﬁles that resulted from the recon-
struction, it sounds more animated owing to the
various resonances and noises from the speaker and
console, and it is a more faithful representation of
how it would have sounded originally.

Pitch and Sound Analysis

Upon hearing the music, a modern listener will be
alerted to several tuning anomalies. 桌子 3 节目
an analysis of some notes CSIRAC was pro-
grammed to play in both Sydney and in Melbourne.
This table shows the standard note name (沥青
class and octave number), the note number in Mr.
Cherry’s program, the frequency of the note in the
equal-tempered scale in A440 tuning, 和, for both
Sydney and Melbourne, the fundamental frequen-
cies of each note and the number of pulses used at
each of those frequencies when CSIRAC played
音乐. (Note that ‘‘(西德:3) 1’’ is implied if no number of
pulses is indicated.) These frequencies are based on
the periods of the pulse loops in the music program
tapes. 因此, they are fundamental frequencies for
the fairly sawtooth-shaped waveform used to create
the sounds, not the result of Fourier analyses of the
笔记, which is investigated later. There are many
notes that use multiple pulse timings, often re-
peated, to approximate a note.

It can also be seen that some note loops com-
bined up to ﬁve different pulse timings (see D4,
悉尼) to try to produce a single note. Other note
loops used up to six pulses in a loop but with sev-
eral of the same period, see for example the notes

the correct times, in effect a digital audio ﬁle of
what CSIRAC would have produced at the time if a
digital recording device were connected across the
loudspeaker terminals. 数字 3 shows an oscillo-
scope screen image of the reconstructed speaker
pulses.

We were interested in reproducing the music as
exactly as possible, certainly with an error of less
than one percent with respect to the waveforms
that would have been heard at the time the pieces
were originally played. The pulse shape as repro-
duced was indeed well within one percent toler-
ance of the CSIRAC pulse shape, but the pulse
timing was at least ten times more accurate than
那. This waveform accuracy would ensure a lis-
tening experience faithful to the original and would
also ensure that any technical analysis of the wave-
form would be valid. The digital audio ﬁles of the
music as played by CSIRAC are an extremely accu-
rate representation of the pulse stream that was
sent to the original loudspeaker and a very good
representation of how CSIRAC would have
sounded.

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桌子 3. Analysis of Some Notes CSIRAC was Programmed to Play in Both Sydney and in Melbourne

Pitch

Note number

Equal-tempered
频率 (赫兹)

CSIRAC note frequencies
and number of pulses,
悉尼 (赫兹)

CSIRAC note frequencies
and number of pulses,
墨尔本 (赫兹)

C2
F-sharp2
G2
A2
A-sharp2
B2
C3
C-sharp3
D3
D-sharp3
C4
C-sharp4
D4
D-sharp4
F-sharp4
G4

0
6
7
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
24
25
26
27
30
31

65.41
92.5
98
110
116.5
123.5
130.8
138.6
146.8
155.6
261.6
277.2
293.7
311.1
370
392

(108.7) (西德:3) 2
115.7
(122.5) (西德:3) 2
(130.2) (西德:3) 2
138.8, 160.3
(144.9) (西德:3) 4, 143.7
157.2, (155.7) (西德:3) 2
(260.4) (西德:3) 3
(277.8) (西德:3) 3, 219.3
282.5, 287.5, 282.5, 142.5, 222.2
248.8, (326.8) (西德:3) 3, 166.7

65.1
183.2, 92.1
196.1, 97.5
(109.6) (西德:3) 6
115.7
(122.5) (西德:3) 2
130.2
(138.9) (西德:3) 2
(146.2) (西德:3) 7
(154.3) (西德:3) 6
260.4
(277.8) (西德:3) 2, 138.9
(292.4) (西德:3) 5, 127.2
(308.6) (西德:3) 6, 154.3
(370.4) (西德:3) 2, 362.3, 370.4, 182.0
(387.6, 793.7) (西德:3) 3, 260.4

from D-sharp4 onwards in the above table. 什么时候
several frequencies are listed for a note, a frequency
that repeats several times does not necessarily
mean that the pulses at that frequency all occur in
a row; a pulse with another ‘‘period’’ can intervene.
换句话说, these are not necessarily sequential
lists of pulse timings. The combination of multiple
different pulse timings was used to approximate
some notes owing to the troubles caused by CSI-
RAC’s timing limitations. The variation in timing
of speaker pulses was caused by the variation in
memory access times, the machine architecture,
and the timing granularity caused by the relatively
low clock speed.

From Table 3, it can be seen that some notes, 为了
example D4, have clearly inharmonic components.
Particularly for the note D4 at Melbourne, 一
might think that if ﬁve pulses can be created in se-
quence that are very close to the desired frequency,
then one more should be possible. 然而, 这
last pulse, providing a frequency of 127.2 赫兹, 有
no harmonic relationship to the note D4. Careful
analysis of Mr. Cherry’s music program has re-
vealed this is owing to the various machine limita-
tions or idiosyncrasies. He must have realized
through experimentation that the low frequencies

were being produced and why, so he made adjust-
ments to minimize their dissonance. With the note
D4, he achieved the best result possible. The struc-
ture of the note loop is several pulses with the cor-
rect period, but the memory was limited, 在那里
were insufﬁcient memory locations with the appro-
priate timing to store another pulse, so an inexact
delay had to be introduced, and exiting the loop
earlier caused other problems. This caused the in-
harmonic pulse.

数字 4 displays the pulse periods for three notes

at Melbourne. It can be seen how different pulses
in a note need a different timing offset, 或延迟,
from a clock division. This is a graphical display of
what the typical code for a note produces. 这
pulses that result in the inharmonic 127.2 Hz fre-
quency for the note D4 at Melbourne can also be
见过.

When listening to the sounds generated by CSI-
RAC, it becomes clear that there are pitches in the
sound that do not appear in the table of how the
notes were programmed. A spectral analysis of the
notes was used to show these pitches, and help to
investigate and explain the sound or timbre of the
various notes. The spectrum graphs in Figures 5
和 6 were taken from the pulse stream as deliv-

Doornbusch

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数字 4. CSIRAC major
cycle timing with pulses
for notes C3, D4, 和
D-sharp4 at Melbourne.
This shows the various de-
lays required from the on-

set of each instruction cy-
cle to produce a pulse with
a speciﬁc period that is
not necessarily simply re-
lated to the machine cycle
时间. The different delays

required between pulses
were achieved by using
different memory loca-
tions and instruction ad-
dresses.

ered to the speaker terminals. The speaker would
ﬁlter this stream, mostly by reducing the higher
部分. The vertical scale is linear amplitude, 和
the horizontal scale is logarithmic frequency with a
range from 10 Hz to 10 千赫.

The spectrum for the note C3 at Melbourne (看

数字 5) shows the harmonics produced by CSI-
RAC’s near-sawtooth pulse shape. This spectrum is
highly representative of most of the notes that CSI-
RAC played, certainly from C2 to C4, 较低的
two octaves of the two-and-a-half octave range, 作为
most of the notes have simple harmonic compo-
尼特.

The upper notes of CSIRAC’s range were the
most difﬁcult to program, as discussed previously,
which is clearly audible from listening to them.
The note D4 at Melbourne (见表 3 和图
6), with a fundamental frequency of 292.4 赫兹, has a
pulse timing that gives rise to an additional fre-
quency component at 127 赫兹. 然而, 这确实
not explain all of the frequencies that appear in the
输出. The upper notes (as all others) sound like
an accurate reconstruction to those who heard
them when CSIRAC was operating. 有
clearly audible lower frequencies in the output that
sound dissonant or inharmonic. The spectrum
节目, 出奇, not only the expected frequen-
cies at 292 赫兹和 127 Hz and their associated har-
monics, but also a frequency component at about

40 赫兹. The 40-Hz component also appears to give
rise to many odd side-band frequencies of all of the
harmonics. This would explain why the note
sounds quite inharmonic. 然而, the existence
of the 40-Hz component took some investigation to
解释. The difference between the planned funda-
mental of 292 Hz and the second harmonic of the
spurious 127-Hz frequency (254 赫兹) 是 38 赫兹. 这
is quite close to the mystery 40 赫兹, but the spec-
tral analysis shows not only a clear 40-Hz compo-
nent but also clear harmonics of it at 80 赫兹, 120
赫兹, 等等. The precision of the measurement
makes it unlikely that it is a difference frequency.
After considerable investigation, the reason for
the 40-Hz component became clear. We found that
对于所有笔记, the program structure was a loop to
send multiple pulses to the speaker at accurate pe-
riods, if sometimes not the desired period. 这
loop is executed a number of times to provide con-
trol over the duration of the note. For the note
D4, the periods of the pulse loop are 3.42 毫秒,
3.42 毫秒, 3.42 毫秒, 3.42 毫秒, 3.42 毫秒, 和
7.76 毫秒. The sum of the loop pulse periods is
24.96 毫秒, which gives a frequency of 40.06 赫兹.
The loop return causes a modulation of the pulses
at the period of the execution of the loop. 这
gives the 40-Hz component in the output. 这
seven highest notes played by CSIRAC all have this
结构, and they also have the spurious low-

电脑音乐杂志

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数字 5. Spectrum of note
C3, 基本的 130.2 赫兹.
This is representative of
most of the notes played
by CSIRAC, 例如
notes in the two octaves
from C2 to C4.

数字 6. Spectrum of note
D4, 基本的 292.4 赫兹.
Note the low-frequency arti-
facts, as discussed in the
文本.

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frequency component in their output. With some
of the other notes, it was possible to cause this
low-frequency component to have some harmonic
relationship to the desired note, thus reducing
somewhat the dissonance created by its unavoid-
able presence.

结论: What Was and What Was Not

CSIRAC was a unique technological achievement
在澳大利亚. It was also part of a unique musical
achievement. CSIRAC, or the CSIR Mk1, was one
of the very ﬁrst computers in the world to make
音乐, and possibly even the ﬁrst. It accomplished
this through a happy conﬂuence of events and the
very intelligent and diligent work of a few people.
The technological feat was extraordinary, given the
state of the hardware used to support the program-
ming and produce the sounds. Similar activity was
taking place slightly later in other parts of the
世界, for example England, and hopefully these ac-
tivities will also be well documented in the future.
The music itself may now seem crude unless

it is understood in the context of its creation.
It was created by engineers who were not knowl-
edgeable of the latest in musical composition prac-

tice and at a time when there was little thought of
digital sound. The idea of using a computer, 这
world’s most ﬂexible machine, to create music was
certainly a leap of imagination at the time. It is a
pity that composers were not invited to use CSI-
RAC and discover how it could have solved several
compositional problems as happened at Bell Labs.
CSIRAC had much to offer composers: 它可以
play almost any frequency within its range, 所以
those interested in microtonal music or alternative
scales and tunings would have found it invaluable.
It could also possibly have been programmed to
play more than one frequency at a time, 虽然
that would have posed a signiﬁcant programming
challenge. 此外, with suitable program-
明, CSIRAC could have played any rhythm and
could have produced rhythmically complex pieces.
There was also the possibility of using it as a com-
position tool, in which some composers were inter-
ested, and which some of the programmers would
have been happy to help implement. Perhaps we
would have had very early examples of computer-
based microtonal music and algorithmic composi-
的.

Nearby composers were interested in these
事物. Percy Grainger was at the University of
Melbourne at the time, and he was already known

Doornbusch

as an experimental composer who was interested in
new sounds, ‘‘free music,’’ electronic music, 所以
在. Peter Thorne (2000) recalls: ‘‘I can remember
Percy Grainger walking past the Computation Lab-
oratory at the time CSIRAC was running, actually
walking down the alleyway between what would
have been the cyclotron and [这] Physics [Build-
英]. The others in the laboratory pointed out of the
window and said, ‘There’s Percy Grainger.’ He was
going towards the Grainger Museum. He was that
close. It must have been in about 1959. Grainger
was at the University when CSIRAC was operat-
ing.’’

It is indeed tempting to imagine what might
have happened if some turn of events had nudged
this solely physical proximity into a meeting and
collaboration. This lack of professional musical in-
put to the musical work, consistently the case for
CSIRAC from 1949 到 1964, stands in stark con-
trast to the approach undertaken at Bell Labs. Max
Mathews and John Pierce were both engineers, 但
they quickly recognized the need to involve musi-
cians in their computer music work and they made
a concerted effort to seek out appropriate people.
The involvement of composers at Bell Labs led to
some of the crucially important design decisions
that in turn led to the development of current com-
puter music. Lamentably, this did not happen with
CSIRAC, perhaps because of its unfortunate isola-
tion both geographically and culturally. CSIRAC
had been programmed to play sounds, it had been
developed as an instrument, and it offered new mu-
sical possibilities, but it was not used to evolve
music as an art. If composers had become involved
from the earliest development, 基本的
questions of ‘‘Why would anyone want to use a
computer to generate music?’’ and ‘‘What does the
application of technology mean for the aesthetics
of music?’’ would have been addressed (Hiller and
Isaacson 1959). Even if this activity did not lead to
an historically signiﬁcant, speciﬁc outcome or an
understanding of the application of computers to
音乐, the musical community would have been
actively thinking about it and engaged with it. 作为
it happened, this would have to wait until the
events in the United States became public.

RAC, both in Sydney and in Melbourne, 不一样
well appreciated as it could have been and thus not
as well promoted as it deserved to be. With more
enthusiasm and imagination, mostly from adminis-
trators, or with some joint research and develop-
ment involving scientists and musicians,
composers could easily have become involved with
CSIRAC, and there could have been more exciting
musical developments. As it stands, there is no en-
during legacy of the music made with CSIRAC. 它
is notable owing to the leap of imagination re-
quired to conceive of using this very early com-
puter to make music when there was no previous
实践, or at least no known practice. 这也是
notable for the programming skill and cunning re-
quired to produce sound and music with this early
机器.

致谢

It has been a pleasure to be involved with some of
the original pioneers of computing in Australia. 我
hope that I have made clear the roles played by the
people who worked with CSIRAC. I would like to
thank all of them and the interviewees (Reginald
Ryan, Terry Holden, Kay Thorne, Peter Thorne,
Ron Bowles, Eileen Hill, Douglas McCann, 和
Dick McGee) for their generous time and assis-
坦斯.

Much of the anecdotal and oral material was
gathered over long periods of casual and personal
contact with the people involved. 例如,
there were several pieces of the puzzle that came
out during the CSIRAC 50th birthday celebrations
in November 1999, and there were regular meet-
ings on Tuesdays with John Spencer, Jurij Semkiw,
Ron Bowles, Peter Thorne, Doug McCann, 和
其他的.

I am particularly grateful to Ron Bowles, Jurij Se-

mkiw, and especially John Spencer for their gra-
cious patience with my naı¨ve questions, 他们的
慷慨, and their skills, without which this pro-
ject could never have progressed beyond the imagi-
nation stage. Many thanks.

The University of Melbourne Computer Science

It appears that the musical programming of CSI-

Department has been extremely helpful and sup-

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portive, providing access to people and facilities.
Thanks are due especially to Peter Thorne and
Leon Sterling for this assistance.

Special thanks to Paul Berg for reviewing this

项目.

This project was very generously assisted and
funded by the Australian Commonwealth Govern-
ment through the Australia Council, its arts fund-
ing and advisory body.

More information on this project is available on-

line at www.cs.mu.oz.au/csirac.

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