Listen to the First Music Ever Made With a Computer

Researchers from New Zealand have restored the very first recording ever made of computer generated music. The three simple melodies, laid down in 1951, were generated by a machine built by the esteemed British computer scientist Alan Turing. Computer scientist Alan Turing is primarily remembered for being the father of artificial intelligence and for hacking the Nazi Enigma machine during the Second World War, but as the co-purveyor of the Church-Turing thesis, he recognized the ability of computers to do just about anything--including making music. With the help of BBC broadcasters, Turing made history by being the first person to use a computer to generate music, and then record that music to a storage medium--in this case a 12-inch acetate disc. Turing created the music at the Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester, England, on a primitive device that occupied nearly an entire floor.