"Computer performance of music was born in 1957 when an IBM 704 in NYC
played a 17 second composition on the Music I program which I wrote." -Max
Mathews [source] Max Mathews and Joan Miller were both acoustic
researchers working at Bell Labs in New Jersey. In 1957, Max Mathews
figured out how to digitally
synthesize sound on a digital computer, and wrote Music I, the first
in a long line of music programming languages to which all digital
synthesis has its root. By 1961, they had gotten up to Music IV, which
they used to create a fully digitally synthesized version of "Daisy
Bell" by Harry Dacre, also known as "Bicycle Built for Two". Arthur
C. Clark heard this rendition when he visited Bell Labs and incorporated
the idea into 2001, A Space Odyssey, later made into a movie by Stanley
Kubrick.
It is quite funny to listen to this piece of music now and think
of it of being revolutionary. Computers have gotten so cheap that
you can by
a greeting card that can play music of similar fidelity. But the
creation of digital synthesis had huge effects on music, starting
out with the Western Art Music tradition, then rapidly spreading around
the
world.