Beeb finds oldest digital music recording

Creaky rendition of God Save The King

19 June 2008 9:55 GMT / By Katie Scott

A recordings of a very basic version of our national anthem as well as children's favourite Baa Baa Black Sheep, are being hailed as historically significant.

The creaky tunes were made by the commercial version of "Baby", which is widely recognised as the forerunner of all modern computers, and was created 60 years ago.

The machine that created the sounds was called the Ferranti Mark 1 computer and the songs, which also include a couple of bars from In The Mood, were captured by the BBC in the Autumn of 1951 during a visit to the University of Manchester.

Before this, the oldest known recordings were believed to have been made on an IBM mainframe computer at Bell Labs in the US in 1957.

"I think it's historically significant", Paul Doornbusch, a computer music composer and historian at the New Zealand School of Music, told BBC News.

"As far as I know it's the earliest recording of a computer playing music in the world, probably by quite a wide margin."

Another machine, CSIRAC, which was Australia's first digital computer, apparently "stunned" audiences with a rendition of Colonel Bogey, but the event was never recorded for posterity.

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