Digging Up Digital Music

Archaeologists think of stone tools in terms of “technologies”—the particular ways that they were made and used—that help us understand the cultures that produced them. Today we have our own technologies, but they come and go at a vastly different pace. Their life spans are measured not in thousands of years, but in months and even days. To modern digital technology, 65 years is an eon.

- Samir S. Patel

The late 1940s and early 1950s saw the birth of the computer age, and one of its nurseries was the Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester, England, led by logician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing. Lesser known among the many innovations to come out of the lab—including “Baby,” the first stored-program computer—are the first melodies generated by computer, the most distant ancestor of modern electronic music. Recently, a philosopher and a composer collaborated to analyze and restore the earliest known recording of these melodies—a founding artifact of the age of digital music.