How Australia played the first music on a computer

CSIRAC, built in Sydney by Australia’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, was among the world’s earliest digital computers. Though it ran at only 1,000 cycles per second, had roughly 2KB of RAM and filled a room, it played music around 1950 or 1951 - before any other computer is known to have done so. Its only familiar output device was a speaker, normally used for brief signals that showed whether a program was running. Programmer Geoff Hill, a mathematician with strong musical knowledge, devised a way to time the computer’s irregular memory operations so pulses reached the speaker at steady intervals and formed notes. He programmed popular tunes, turning a demanding technical feat into a demonstration that captivated visitors and colleagues.

CSIRAC’s music was never recorded at the time, and the computer’s musical role was largely a novelty rather than the start of a research program. After it moved to the University of Melbourne in 1956, mathematics professor Tom Cherry created a system that let users feed it punched-paper musical scores. A later reconstruction team recreated the machine’s pulse shapes, entered surviving programs from paper tape and recorded the tunes through a period-appropriate speaker. The account argues that Australia’s early lead did not translate into wider advances: research priorities shifted away from computing, while computer music developed most visibly in the United States from the late 1950s. It also notes that composer Percy Grainger lived near CSIRAC but never worked with it, a missed chance to join an adventurous musician with a machine capable of realizing new ideas.