The first computer in history sang

In the early 1960s, not many people could buy an IBM 704 – one of the most powerful computers of its time – because installation costs could reach up to 2 million USD. During the period 1955 – 1960, IBM produced only 123 of these computers.

By current standards, users still aren’t getting that much computing power for such a hefty price tag. But back then, if they wanted a machine that could perform complex or quick calculations, they had few other options. The IBM 704 could perform 12,000 floating-point additions per second. An accounting department cannot keep up with its pace either.

But addition and subtraction doesn’t seem very appealing. Therefore, people came up with the interesting idea of ​​teaching the IBM 704 to sing. In 1961, American computer scientists John Kelly and Carol Lockbaum at Bell Labs – a famous computer science organization in New Jersey – began implementing this pioneering computer music project.

Digital music was not an entirely new development, even in the 1960s, but singing was an entirely different challenge, requiring breakthroughs in speech synthesis technology. At that time, Bell Labs had more expertise in this field than any other organization in the world.

The Bell Labs team needed a song for the project and decided on one Daisy Bellalso known as Bicycle Built for Twowritten by English musician Harry Dacre in 1892. The reason they chose this strange classical tune is unknown, but it may be because the song’s title is a reference to Bell Labs.

Lochbaum and Kelly used an IBM 704 to program a new method for electronically synthesizing the human voice, now known as the Kelly-Lochbaum Voice Path. Their synthesized voices were placed over a synthetic backing track that Max Mathews, an electrical engineer and amateur violinist, created.

This process was not easy to do at that time. Real-time listening technology had not yet been developed, so Mathews had to record an hour of output, then speed it up on tape to play back 17 seconds of music. Matthews connected his violin to an IBM 704 and became the first artist in history to transfer live music to a computer for synthesis and playback.

Finally, the singing part Daisy Bell of the computer lasts about 30 seconds. The brilliant minds at Bell Labs often perform demonstrations Daisy Bell to visitors, including famous British writer Arthur C. Clarke. In 2009, this version was placed on the Library of Congress’s National Recording List as one of the first examples of digital music recording, paving the way for modern music production and the widespread use of digital formats in music distribution.

“By today’s standards, demo Daisy Bell of the 704 sounds quite primitive. The sound was as dull as the sound of dialing a phone number, after all it was just a robot’s voice. However, version Daisy Bell represented by the IBM computer – the meeting of music and machines – remains a bold and unique achievement, a leap into a new world,” said Cary O’Dell, assistant to the Board of Directors of the Archives. National Recording Archives of the Library of Congress, comments.