60 years ago, Princeton University engineers noticed members of the music department, staring agog at a recently-installed computer. It wasn’t long before a not-so-unlikely alliance was formed that helped to change history.
The story of New Jersey’s role in the creation of digital music is the subject of a new podcast. “Composers & Computers” will span six decades in five installments and include interviews with 20 people. Their commentary will be punctuated by vintage computer and electronic music clips.
Princeton music faculty shared an analog synthesizer with Columbia University in the 1950s. In 1962, composers entered Princeton’s new Computer Center in the Engineering Quadrangle, and were soon engaged in trying to figure out how to harness the new IBM 7090 to make music. Then they worked to improve that music.
Some of the most complex works ever written drove numerous technological innovations, and vice versa. Princeton composers and computer engineers worked together to program some of the earliest music composition software, invented a device to hear the music they were creating, synthesized some of the earliest computer-generated speech for use in music, and more.
The story has a distinctly New Jersey flavor, illuminating the work of engineers at RCA in Princeton in the 1950s and Bell Labs in Murray Hill in the 1960s.
The podcast will tackle the science of sound in a refreshing and accessible way. The series promises to be full of human drama, as participants in the project became great friends in their shared quest to coax sound out of a previously-silent, room-sized machine.
The podcast will be available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, as well as the Princeton Engineering website, https://engineering.princeton.edu/series/composers-computers-podcast. The first two episodes will drop today, and one episode will run each week for the next three weeks.
Here’s a link to the series’ introduction:
Introducing “Composers & Computers,” a new podcast about digital music
Episode 1:
Episode 2:
PHOTO (left to right): Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center personnel Milton Babbitt, Mario Davidovsky, Pril Smiley, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, and Alice Shields, circa 1970