More PDP-1 music, now in .mp3 format
Daniel P. B. Smith
now contains five newly-added pieces: As Time Goes By, Bach's Little
Fugue in G. Minor, Christmas Carol medley, Goldfinger, We Shall
Overcome, all in glorious high-fidelity .mp3 format. .mp3 versions of
the previous five pieces have been added, including the _complete_ Bach
Passacaglia and Fugue.
These were recorded circa 1965 from the PDP-1 computer on the second
floor of MIT's building 26. The "harmony compiler" software was designed
by Pete Samson. The PDP-1 music hardware consisted of a single register
with four flip-flops, each individually connected through simple RC
filters to either of two amplifiers and speakers. Pete was fond of
baroque music and the Harmony Compiler had special provisions for
baroque turns and trills.
The hardware allowed four-part harmony, but no dynamics or instrumental
synthesis. At the time, circa 1964, the Moog synthesizer was about ten
years in the future. To be sure, the room-filling RCA music synthesizer
was a decade in the past, and elaborate D-to-A wave-synthesis music was
being generated on 7090-class machines at Bell Labs (by John Pierce, M.
V. Mathews, and others) and at MIT (by Ercolino Ferretti and others).
Still, compared to playing tunes on IBM chain printers, this was pretty
sophisticated stuff.
--
Daniel P. B. Smith
Email address: dpbs...@world.std.com
"Lifetime forwarding" address: dpbs...@alum.mit.edu
Howard S Shubs
"Daniel P. B. Smith" <dpbs...@bellatlantic.net> wrote:
> The hardware allowed four-part harmony, but no dynamics or instrumental
> synthesis. At the time, circa 1964, the Moog synthesizer was about ten
> years in the future. To be sure, the room-filling RCA music synthesizer
> was a decade in the past, and elaborate D-to-A wave-synthesis music was
> being generated on 7090-class machines at Bell Labs (by John Pierce, M.
> V. Mathews, and others) and at MIT (by Ercolino Ferretti and others).
> Still, compared to playing tunes on IBM chain printers, this was pretty
> sophisticated stuff.
This reminds me strongly of MusicWorks, a program on the Macintosh 20
years later. Wonderful!!
--
Howard S Shubs
"Run in circles, scream and shout!" "I hope you have good backups!"
Aren't there any networked SJFs around?
Joe Pfeiffer
Though it should be pointed out that the Moog was by no means ten
years in the future -- he was producing his modular synthesizers in
1965 (according to http://moogarchives.com/chrono.htm).
--
Joseph J. Pfeiffer, Jr., Ph.D. Phone -- (505) 646-1605
Department of Computer Science FAX -- (505) 646-1002
New Mexico State University http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~pfeiffer
Southwestern NM Regional Science and Engr Fair: http://www.nmsu.edu/~scifair
CBFalconer
>
> Very, very cool stuff -- thank you!
>
> Though it should be pointed out that the Moog was by no means ten
> years in the future -- he was producing his modular synthesizers in
> 1965 (according to http://moogarchives.com/chrono.htm).
And there was someone in Ottawa at the National Research Council
building some sort of simulator/harmonizer - anyway it created
music - back in the early '50s. Definitely before '58.
--
Chuck F (cbfal...@yahoo.com) (cbfal...@XXXXworldnet.att.net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
(Remove "XXXX" from reply address. yahoo works unmodified)
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Douglas H. Quebbeman
news:3C7B0A90...@yahoo.com...
> Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
> >
> > Very, very cool stuff -- thank you!
> >
> > Though it should be pointed out that the Moog was by no means ten
> > years in the future -- he was producing his modular synthesizers in
> > 1965 (according to http://moogarchives.com/chrono.htm).
>
> And there was someone in Ottawa at the National Research Council
> building some sort of simulator/harmonizer - anyway it created
> music - back in the early '50s. Definitely before '58.
Are you thinking (perhaps) of the Theremin?
-dq
Joe Morris
>These were recorded circa 1965 from the PDP-1 computer on the second
>floor of MIT's building 26. The "harmony compiler" software was designed
>by Pete Samson. The PDP-1 music hardware consisted of a single register
>with four flip-flops, each individually connected through simple RC
>filters to either of two amplifiers and speakers.
Unless something changed in the music output interface after I left,
there wasn't any special hardware in the machine involved in the
process. The PDP-1 had latches called "program flags;" these were
program-conrolled flipflops which could be set, cleared, and
interrogated programmatically. (In some other systems, this mechanism
was called "sense lights.")
Each set, clear, or interrogation comsumed one full memory cycle.
One nice thing about the PDP-1 was that just about every interesting
latch in the system was brought out to a taper pin block on the right
side of the machine (frame 2?) where it could be wired to anything you
wanted. I don't know who designed the interface -- it was in place
when I first saw the machine -- but the pins connected to the program
flag latches were connected through an LC network and fed to a small
Heathkit amplifier in Alan Kotok's office. (The door to his office
was about four feet from the console.)
> Pete was fond of
>baroque music and the Harmony Compiler had special provisions for
>baroque turns and trills.
Somehow I never managed to get a copy of the documentation for the
program, but as I recall it Pete put into it just about every musical
characteristic possible. All of this on a machine with a 5 usec cycle
and 4K of 18-bit words (the machine may also have had another 4K of
bank-switched memory).
Joe Morris
Joe Morris
>"CBFalconer" <cbfal...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> And there was someone in Ottawa at the National Research Council
>> building some sort of simulator/harmonizer - anyway it created
>> music - back in the early '50s. Definitely before '58.
>Are you thinking (perhaps) of the Theremin?
Um...I doubt it; I never saw anyone claim to have figured out a way
to make a Theremin produce more than a single tone at a time.
I tried "playing" a Theremin a few times, but never managed to produce
anything other than sounds that scared the cat.
Joe Morris
CBFalconer
No, there was some other word or phrase, I believe. Bit rot.
Stan Barr
>Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
>>
>> Very, very cool stuff -- thank you!
>>
>> Though it should be pointed out that the Moog was by no means ten
>> years in the future -- he was producing his modular synthesizers in
>> 1965 (according to http://moogarchives.com/chrono.htm).
>
>And there was someone in Ottawa at the National Research Council
>building some sort of simulator/harmonizer - anyway it created
>music - back in the early '50s. Definitely before '58.
When did the BBCs Radiophonic Workshop start? They were one of the
early pioneers of electronic music.
--
Cheers,
Stan Barr st...@dial.pipex.com
The future was never like this!
Neil Barnes
<slrna7mn9m...@citadel.metropolis.local>:
> When did the BBCs Radiophonic Workshop start? They were one of the
> early pioneers of electronic music.
>
1st April 1958, apparently.
http://www.mb21.co.uk/ether.net/radiophonics/intro.shtml
--
I have a quantum car. Every time I look at the speedometer I get lost...
barnacle
http://www.nailed-barnacle.co.uk
Daniel P. B. Smith
jcmo...@mitre.org (Joe Morris) wrote:
At the time I was there (1962-1966) I'm about 90% certain that it was
using dedicated flip-flops that were separate from any of the standard
machine hardware. The symbols in the assembler to access the bits had
to be defined separately, and while music was playing there was no
obvious accompanying activity in the console lights. If I recall
correctly, there were four instructions each of which strobed the high
bit of one of the registers--probably the IO--into one of the four
flip-flops.
As "We Shall Overcome" attests, the hardware did evolve, adding the
ability to set the overall loudness to one of four levels. It was a
remarkably useless feature. It was amazing how musically expressive
things like "articulation" (duration of the note, from staccatto to
legato) and tempo were, and how relatively inexpressive loudness was.
Of course, that PDP-1 was constantly having its hardware worked over.
It was a testbed for, I think, Jack Dennis' ideas. Very shortly after I
started hanging around the computer room, the console and main bays were
separated, many additional bays added, the thing was wired up for
time-sharing... and around 1967 or so it even acquired an index register.
dgr...@cs.csuabk.edu
>>"CBFalconer" <cbfal...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> And there was someone in Ottawa at the National Research Council
>>> building some sort of simulator/harmonizer - anyway it created
>>> music - back in the early '50s. Definitely before '58.
>>Are you thinking (perhaps) of the Theremin?
> Um...I doubt it; I never saw anyone claim to have figured out a way
> to make a Theremin produce more than a single tone at a time.
While the Theremin is strictly monophonic, nobody said you can't use one
to control a modular synthesizer or add MIDI controller to one to get
multiple tones. Maybe that's cheating, but it's certainly a fun way to
make noise.
--
David Griffith
dgr...@cs.csubak.edu
Brian Inglis
wrote:
>On Tue, 26 Feb 2002 04:14:33 GMT, CBFalconer <cbfal...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
>>>
>>> Very, very cool stuff -- thank you!
>>>
>>> Though it should be pointed out that the Moog was by no means ten
>>> years in the future -- he was producing his modular synthesizers in
>>> 1965 (according to http://moogarchives.com/chrono.htm).
>>
>>And there was someone in Ottawa at the National Research Council
>>building some sort of simulator/harmonizer - anyway it created
>>music - back in the early '50s. Definitely before '58.
>
>When did the BBCs Radiophonic Workshop start? They were one of the
>early pioneers of electronic music.
First I heard of it was when the original Dr. Who series started
-- late 50s?
--
Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Brian....@CSi.com (Brian dot Inglis at SystematicSw dot ab dot ca)
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Brian {Hamilton Kelly}
nailed_...@NOSPAMhotmail.com "Neil Barnes" writes:
> st...@dial.pipex.com (Stan Barr) wrote in
> <slrna7mn9m...@citadel.metropolis.local>:
>
> > When did the BBCs Radiophonic Workshop start? They were one of the
> > early pioneers of electronic music.
> >
>
> 1st April 1958, apparently.
> http://www.mb21.co.uk/ether.net/radiophonics/intro.shtml
Although I'm sure that that was only a "regularization" of something that
had already existed for some years: it's just that finally the technical
guys got recognition for all the fancy sound effects they'd been
generating for a number of years (e.g. on Journey into Space, ca.1953).
--
Brian {Hamilton Kelly} b...@dsl.co.uk
"We have gone from a world of concentrated knowledge and wisdom to one of
distributed ignorance. And we know and understand less while being incr-
easingly capable." Prof. Peter Cochrane, formerly of BT Labs
Brian {Hamilton Kelly}
jcmo...@mitre.org "Joe Morris" writes:
> "Douglas H. Quebbeman" <do...@ixnayamspayiglou.com> writes:
>
> >Are you thinking (perhaps) of the Theremin?
>
> Um...I doubt it; I never saw anyone claim to have figured out a way
> to make a Theremin produce more than a single tone at a time.
There was "music" written for the Elliott 803 mid-1960s-ish that produced
polyphonic counterpoint. ISTR being most impressed by The Arrival of the
Queen of Sheba. Of course, it wasn't really producing more than one note
at a time: the loudspeaker could only "peep" when appropriately driven,
but the human ear was fooled into thinking that all the different notes
were being produced simultaneously.
> I tried "playing" a Theremin a few times, but never managed to produce
> anything other than sounds that scared the cat.
:-)
Besides which, the Theremin dates back to pre-WWII; 1938, IIRC.
(I've arrived late to this thread: RL got in the way of my reading afc
for a couple or so weeks. What sort of date was it that Donald Michie
had a computer /singing/ Daisy at Edinburgh?)
Nick Spalding
> Besides which, the Theremin dates back to pre-WWII; 1938, IIRC.
Encarta thinks it was earlier:
"The theremin, a compact apparatus invented by the Russian physicist
Leon Theremin, was fashionable in the late 1920s and 1930s, although
it could play only a single melodic line."
and Grolier is more specific:
"The theremin, one of the first successful electronic musical
instruments, was invented about 1924 by the Russian Leon Theremin."
--
Nick Spalding
jmfb...@aol.com
The last time that stuff was "tested" was on our KI to make sure
the PDP line still hummed. Our QA guy would hook up an amp
and run the software (instead of QAing like he should).
/BAH
Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.
Joe Pfeiffer
> On Tue, 26 Feb 2002 22:42:27 -0700, Brian Inglis
> <Brian....@SystematicSw.ab.ca> sprachen:
>
> >First I heard of it was when the original Dr. Who series started
> >-- late 50s?
>
> Mid-60s for Dr Who.
Something very cool about that is that their sound effects were done
on a Mellotron... a very spiffy musical instrument that turned out to
be perfect for this kind of work: when you pressed a key, it would
drag a tape sample across a tape head. And they're back in
production now.
Another Moog note: that Moog archives page I found said that in the
late 1950s he was building... theremins!
Charlie Gibbs
(Brian {Hamilton Kelly}) writes:
>There was "music" written for the Elliott 803 mid-1960s-ish that
>produced polyphonic counterpoint. ISTR being most impressed by
>The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba. Of course, it wasn't really
>producing more than one note at a time: the loudspeaker could only
>"peep" when appropriately driven, but the human ear was fooled
>into thinking that all the different notes were being produced
>simultaneously.
Not quite as old, but still qualifying as folklore, is the program
I had for my IMSAI that toggled the processor's "interrupts enabled"
line fast enough to generate three-part harmony. A couple of
components hung on the mother board would pick off the signal
and send it to an audio amplifier. I remember my reaction the
first time I heard it in action, and I still think about it any
time I hear "The Harmonious Blacksmith", which it played in all
of its glorious variations.
--
cgi...@sky.bus.com (Charlie Gibbs)
Remove the first period after the "at" sign to reply.
I don't read top-posted messages. If you want me to see your reply,
appropriately trim the quoted text and put your reply below it.
Brian {Hamilton Kelly}
Brian....@SystematicSw.ab.ca "Brian Inglis" writes:
> On 26 Feb 2002 18:29:37 GMT, st...@dial.pipex.com (Stan Barr)
> wrote:
>
> >When did the BBCs Radiophonic Workshop start? They were one of the
> >early pioneers of electronic music.
>
> First I heard of it was when the original Dr. Who series started
Indeed, I believe many peoples' first knowledge of the existence of the
Radiophonic Workshop may have been through that programme: they obviously
would read credits on the screen whilst seemingly have ignored those
spoken by the radio's continuity announcer.
> -- late 50s?
No: the first episode of Dr Who was either just before or just after
JFK's assassination (can't remember which at present: doubtless someone
will be along with the exact date).
dawks
wrote:
>On Tue, 26 Feb 2002 22:42:27 -0700, Brian Inglis
><Brian....@SystematicSw.ab.ca> sprachen:
>
>>First I heard of it was when the original Dr. Who series started
>>-- late 50s?
>
>Mid-60s for Dr Who.
>
To the Web! of course:
63-64.
Very much around the time Kennedy was assasinated.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/episode_guide/index_first.shtml
dawks.
--
The world is divided into two sorts of people: those that believe that the world is divided into two sorts of people and those that don't.
Joe Morris
*gasp* -- an INDEX REGISTER??? on a PDP-1? <grin>
The PDP-1 on the second floor of building 26 (adjacent to the TX-0
and above the 7090 machine room) was definitely Jack's playtoy. When
I last saw it (in 1963) it had already acquired the "time sharing
consoles" ...
... rummaging through files ...
... that were described in memo PDP-6 dated 22 May 1962 (not '63)
titled "Time Sharing Operation of the Electrical Engineering PDP-1
Computer." The memo isn't signed or attributed to any particular
author, unlike most of the PDP-1 memo series.
For readers here who get uncomfortable when their computer doesn't
have at least 256 MB of memory, here is the memory layout shown
in the memo: (in terms of 18-bit words; addresses in octal)
7777 +-------------+
| executive |
| routine |
7000 (?) +-------------+
| User's |
| Protected |
| Block |
6000 (?) +-------------+
| |
| User's |
| Program |
| and |
| data |
| |
0000 +-------------+
(The question marks appear in the original)
So...the entire user address space was 6000 (octal) or ~3000 (decimal)
words max. Can you say "NO BLOATWARE PERMITTED"? <g>
Joe Morris
Brian Inglis
Kelly}) wrote:
>In article <a5g9pf$49a$1...@newslocal.mitre.org>
> jcmo...@mitre.org "Joe Morris" writes:
>
>> "Douglas H. Quebbeman" <do...@ixnayamspayiglou.com> writes:
>>
>> >Are you thinking (perhaps) of the Theremin?
>>
>> Um...I doubt it; I never saw anyone claim to have figured out a way
>> to make a Theremin produce more than a single tone at a time.
>
>There was "music" written for the Elliott 803 mid-1960s-ish that produced
>polyphonic counterpoint. ISTR being most impressed by The Arrival of the
>Queen of Sheba. Of course, it wasn't really producing more than one note
>at a time: the loudspeaker could only "peep" when appropriately driven,
>but the human ear was fooled into thinking that all the different notes
>were being produced simultaneously.
>
>> I tried "playing" a Theremin a few times, but never managed to produce
>> anything other than sounds that scared the cat.
>
>:-)
>
>Besides which, the Theremin dates back to pre-WWII; 1938, IIRC.
>
>(I've arrived late to this thread: RL got in the way of my reading afc
>for a couple or so weeks. What sort of date was it that Donald Michie
>had a computer /singing/ Daisy at Edinburgh?)
Only reference I could find in webspace was by Stephen Cass in
IEEE Spectrum Online, September 2000, Volume 37, Number 9,
"Weekly Websights: Sound and Music":
"As HAL is lobotomized in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, (was I
the only one rooting for the computer?) he sings Daisy, Daisy -
and not by chance. This was the first tune ever reproduced by a
digital computer in the early 1960's."
Didn't realize Donald Michie worked at Bletchley on Colossus with
Turing, then went medical in molecular biology, before being
tempted back to the dark side.
Daniel P. B. Smith
jcmo...@mitre.org (Joe Morris) wrote:
It seemed like an awful lot to me a year or two later, when I was
programming a LINC with 2K of 12-bit words.
And THAT was the extended model (the standard model had 1K of 12-bit
words). Of course, it also had a LINCtape with nearly... how much? 700
blocks of 512 words each or something like that? More than half a
megabyte, anyway. And, unlike "real" tapes and like the diskettes that
became available some years later, it was formatted with fixed-location
blocks and you could update in place. So, you could (and did) do a lot
by reading in overlays off the tape. Hey, it was pretty fast--average
random-access time was only about twenty seconds or so...
Dennis Ritchie
...
> >(I've arrived late to this thread: RL got in the way of my reading afc
> >for a couple or so weeks. What sort of date was it that Donald Michie
> >had a computer /singing/ Daisy at Edinburgh?)
>
> Only reference I could find in webspace was by Stephen Cass in
> IEEE Spectrum Online, September 2000, Volume 37, Number 9,
> "Weekly Websights: Sound and Music":
>
> "As HAL is lobotomized in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, (was I
> the only one rooting for the computer?) he sings Daisy, Daisy -
> and not by chance. This was the first tune ever reproduced by a
> digital computer in the early 1960's."
The particular rendition in the movie was, I'm pretty sure, done at Bell Labs.
I found a cite of Clarke saying so at
http://www.halslegacy.com/interviews/clarke3.html , as follows
Stork: There's a wonderful scene of HAL singing Daisy. Can you tell us the
source
of that?
Clarke: When HAL is disconnected and sings "Daisy, Daisy" that's an in joke
because the first computer that was taught to speak at Bell Labs in the
1940s,
50s, did sing "Daisy, Daisy", in a very mechanical voice, and that was
arranged by
my friend John Pierce, the director of the Lab.
Pierce deserves much credit for this, since he was the
boss of the folks mentioned in my quote below.
Michie might have had a singing Daisy too, of course.
By the way, the liner notes from the record mentioned below are at
http://www.317x.com/albums/i/IBM/card.html .
I dredged up this from an a.f.c posting of mine in 2000, the
article with Message-ID: <3A0B9190...@bell-labs.com> on google:
Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
> In article <3A0B0FB2...@uchicago.edu> sim...@uchicago.edu
> (Simon Allaway) writes:
> ...
> >Realaudio clip of "Daisy" generated on an IBM 7094 in 1961 by John
> >Kelly and Carol Lockbaum.
(The spelling is actually Lochbaum -- dmr)
> >http://www.vortex.com/rmf/daisy.ram
> >
> >I'm intrigued as to what mechanism actually made the noise. Or was it
> >just interference picked up by a nearby radio?
>
> In the late '60s I heard an album entitled "Music from Mathematics",
> which contained that same "Daisy" plus many other things. It claimed
> that the sounds were made by an "IBM 7094 and digital-to-sound
> transducer" - which sounds like some sort of dedicated hardware.
> By this time I had already heard the IBM 1620 demo which did use
> a radio, and was inspired to write my own for the Univac 9300 -
> this was much better. I can't remember whether the album's liner
> notes said anything about the hardware that was used.
My family used to have that record too--it was, I think, a 10" LP.
It came from a conjugation of two lines of research at Bell Labs
during (approximately) the 60's. The verbal part was a demo of the
human vocal-tract modeling work--vocoders and whatnot--by Kelly, Lochbaum
and others; the musical aspect owed mainly to the inspiration
of Max Mathews, an early pioneer in digital music. I don't know
how the final D-A worked, but in general the digital representation
was indeed generated, after much computation, on magnetic tape which
was later read by the transducer.
This all took place just down the hall from my office, but mostly a bit
before I arrived in it.
Dennis
clu...@lycos.com
Years ago, 1973 or so, we had a Wang 600b programable calculator in my
high school. I brought in an AM radio one day to listen to some music
and learned that logic circuits are quit musical. We played with some
loops but never got much out of it. I always wondered if some one
else on more powerfull hardware did this.
Enjoyed the music,
Wes
"Daniel P. B. Smith" <dpbs...@bellatlantic.net> wrote:
>http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/pdp1music/pdp1music.html
>
>now contains five newly-added pieces: As Time Goes By, Bach's Little
>Fugue in G. Minor, Christmas Carol medley, Goldfinger, We Shall
>Overcome, all in glorious high-fidelity .mp3 format. .mp3 versions of
--
Reply to:
Whiskey Echo Sierra Sierra AT Gee Tee EYE EYE dot COM
Lycos address is a spam trap.
Anders Thulin
clu...@lycos.com wrote:
> Years ago, 1973 or so, we had a Wang 600b programable calculator in my
> high school. I brought in an AM radio one day to listen to some music
> and learned that logic circuits are quit musical. We played with some
> loops but never got much out of it. I always wondered if some one
> else on more powerfull hardware did this.
There were some 'music' programs for the SAAB D21 computer -- the first
Swedish commercial computer, I believe. They were intended for playing over
the loudspeaker connected to a bit in the multiplier register, but it was
possible to 'enjoy' them over the radio as well. Of course, the 'bass slaps'
performed by the tape stations (Potter) (or in some cases the *line*printer)
did not transmit well that way ...
I used to have a tape with 'the collected performances of SAAB D21/D22'
but it's probably gone now ...
--
Anders Thulin a...@algonet.se http://www.algonet.se/~ath
Anders Thulin
Anders Thulin wrote:
> There were some 'music' programs for the SAAB D21 computer
I find that some of it has been saved:
http://www.ctrl-c.liu.se/misc/datasaab/musik-eng.html
The piece where the tape stations 'stomp the beat' are unfortunately not
there, though.