New Zealand researchers restored the world's first recorded computer music read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/1012-new-zealand-researchers-restored-the-world-s-first-recorded-computer-music

New Zealand researchers have restored the first recording of computer-generated music, created more than 65 years ago using programming techniques devised by Alan Turing.

Researchers at the University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch said, it showed Turing, best known as the father of computing who broke the WWII Enigma code was also a musical innovator.

"Alan Turing's pioneering work in the late 1940s on transforming the computer into a musical instrument has been largely overlooked. The recording was made 65 years ago by a BBC outside-broadcast unit at the Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester, northern England.

However, when UC professor Jack Copeland and composer Jason Long examined the 12-inch (30.5 centimeter) acetate disc containing the music, they found the audio was distorted.

The frequencies in the recording were not accurate. The recording gave at best only a rough impression of how the computer sounded.

There was a deviation in the speed of the recording, probably as a result of the turntable in BBC's portable disc cutter rotating too fast.  But, with some electronic detective work, it proved possible to restore the recording, with the result that the true sound of this ancestral computer can be heard once again, for the first time in more than half a century.

The computer music researchers were able to calculate exactly how much the recording had to be speeded up in order to reproduce the original sound of the computer.

Researchers said, as well as increasing the speed and altering the frequencies. We filtered out extraneous noise from the recording and using pitch correction software removed the effects of a troublesome wobble in the speed of the recording. It was a beautiful moment when we first heard the true sound of Turing's computer.

The aural artifact, which paved the way for everything from synthesizers to modern electronics, opens with a staunchly conservative tune the British national anthem “God Save the King”.