Music, Digital or Not

Colourful graphic equaliser cartoon, representing frequencies

Where music mixes with computing

Digital music took over from analogue music for recording long ago, because of the flexibility, but there are more ways that music and computing mix than just recording. From robots playing instruments to novel sounds, newly invented instruments and music that no human could play: music, computer science and electronic engineering are now entwined.

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Clapping Music

Peruvian women dancing and clapping in Lima, Peruby

“Get rhythm when you get the blues” – as Country legend Johnny Cash’s lyrics suggest, rhythm cheers people up. We can all hear, feel and see it. We can clap, tap or beatbox. It comes naturally, but how? We don’t really know. You can help find out by playing a game based on some music that involves nothing but clapping… (read on)

Daphne Oram: the dawn of music humans can’t play

A music score in a mass of colour

What links James Bond, a classic 1950s radio comedy series and a machine for creating music by drawing? … Electronic music pioneer: Daphne Oram.… (read on)

The first computer music

Robot playing a horn

The first recorded music by a computer program was the result of a flamboyant flourish added on the end of a program that played draughts in the early 1950s. It played God Save the King….. (read on)

Music Making Mates for Mortimer

Robot Mortimer playing drums

Robots are cool. Fact. But can they keep you interested for more than a short time? Over months? Years even? Louis McCallum tells us about his research using Mortimer a drumming robot… (read on)

Stopping sounds getting left behind: the Bela computer

Clock under ripples of blue sound

Computer-based musical instruments are so flexible and becoming more popular. They have had one disadvantage though. The sound could drag behind the musician in a way that made some digital instruments seem unplayable. Thanks to a new computer called Bela, that problem may now be a thing of the past.…(read on)

Ada and the music machine

Charles Babbage found barrel organs so incredibly irritating that he waged a campaign to clear them from the streets. His hatred, however, may have led to Ada Lovelace’s greatest idea.… (read on)

Machines Inventing Musical Instruments

Machine Learning is the technology driving driverless cars, recognising faces in your photo collection and more, but how could it help machines invent new instruments? Rebecca Fiebrink is finding out….. (read on)

Delia Derbyshire: Say it sounds like singing

Many names stand out as pioneers of electronic music, combining computer science, electronics and music to create new and amazing sounds. Kraftwerk would top many people’s lists of the most influential bands and Jean-Michel Jarre must surely be up there. One of the most influential creators of electronic music, a legend to those in the know, is barely known by comparison though: Delia Derbyshire…. (read on)

Film Futures: Brassed Off

Computer Scientists and digital artists are behind the fabulous special effects and computer generated imagery we see in today’s movies, but for a bit of fun, in this series, we look at how movie plots could change if they involved Computer Scientists. Here we look at an alternative version of the film Brassed Off…. (read on)

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More to come (of course)

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This page is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

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