What was the first album made entirely on a computer?
Computer music goes back longer than many might think. It is taken for granted now, but the road to crafting, producing and even marketing your new album on one device is a long and innovative one, paved by university professors and scientists before artists realised the computer’s artistic potential. The ubiquity of technology and its rapacious pace of evolution means Gorillaz‘s The Fall largely fleshed out on an iPad while Damon Albarn was on tour, or Prince Harvey’s recording of 2015’s Phatass entirely on Macs at the Soho Apple Store serves as novel footnotes in the respective album’s backstories over milestones of the music industry.
It’s difficult to pin down an exact first album, but the history of computer music contains many pioneering landmarks. University of Manchester’s Ferranti Mk 1 was long thought to hold the record for the earliest example of computer music.
Realising its auditory feedback could be altered in pitch, campus scientist Christopher Strachey programmed the computer to play a medley of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ and ‘God Save the King’, captured by the BBC in 1951. It was discovered years later that Australia’s first digital computer, CSIRAC, had performed a synthetic rendition of ‘Colonel Bogey’ a few weeks prior, beating Manchester to the punch card.
With the arrival of the IBM 74, electronics engineer Max Mathews wrote the MUSIC programme while at Bell Labs in America, crafting a 17-second composition exhibited in New York in 1957. Speaking to Frieze in 2011, Mathews acknowledged the computer’s strange, synthetic, sonic possibilities: “We knew at the beginning that the computer could make any sound the human ear could hear, and any timbre. That was not true of traditional instruments. The violin is certainly beautiful, but it will always sound like a violin. That can be very good, and it’s also limited. And the computer is not limited.”
While 1982’s Commodore 64 is mostly remembered for its early home video gaming, its pioneering SID sound chip enabled budding game developers the greater opportunity to create their own scores. German techno artist Zombie Nation borrowed chip musician David Whittaker’s riff from 1984’s Lazy Jones as the main sample for his mega 1999 hit ‘Kenfkraft 400’, such is the Commodore 64’s affection for a generation of electronic musicians.
Digital recordings in the business were slowly becoming practised in the 1970s. While Japanese composer’s The World Of Stomu Yamash’ta 1 & 2 from 1971 was the world’s first commercially available digital record, it’s Ry Cooder’s Bop til you Drop from 1979 that was the first digitally recorded pop album, recorded on a digital 32-track 3M machine, a first of the era.
The advent of digital audio workstations like Ableton or Pro Tools thrust computers away from academic curiosities to full-blown industry practice. Media technology company Steinberg’s Cubase software established the onscreen layout we all know today back in 1989, the vertical list of tracks and horizontal timeline becoming the standard interface for all following programmes. Ricky Martin’s ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’ was the number one first single entirely constructed via Pro Tools.
With music technology now becoming reliable on a smartphone, and Nintendo setting their sites on future musical possibilities, the computer’s hand in musical innovation looks set to continue for a long while yet.
