A scratchy BBC recording, dating back to 1951, of Baa Baa Black Sheep In the Mood are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer generated music. Originally captured during a visit to the University of Manchester, the recording has been unveiled as part of the 60th Anniversary of "Baby", the forerunner of all modern computers. The tunes were played on a Ferranti Mark 1 computer, a commercial version of the Baby Machine.
"I think it's historically significant," Paul Doornbusch, a computer music composer and historian at the New Zealand School of Music, told BBC News. "As far as I know it's the earliest recording of a computer playing music in the world, probably by quite a wide margin." The previous oldest known recordings were made on an IBM mainframe computer at Bell Labs in the US in 1957, he said but they were not the first to have a computer play music," That honour goes to a third machine called CSIRAC, Australia's first digital computer, which "stunned" audiences with a rendition of Colonel Bogey. "It played music months or weeks before the Manchester recording," he said.
However, no one has yet unearthed a recording of CSIRAC in action. Documentary evidence of the Manchester machine's musical abilities exists thanks to a BBC outside broadcasting team who had gone to the University to record an edition of Children's Hour.
