National Museum of Computing - Matthew C Applegate commission
Obsolete?
20th - 21st March 2009
Modern music will soon be heard from some of the earliest and rarest computers in the world at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.
The project entitled Obsolete? is the brainchild of internationally renowned chip tune musician Matthew C Applegate (Pixelh8) and is being funded by the Performing Rights Society Foundation. It will culminate in concerts at Bletchley Park in March 2009.
Matthew Applegate said: “The music of Obsolete? will be made from machines such as Colossus Mark 2, the rebuild of the world's first programmable electronic computer used for code breaking in World War II, the Elliot 803 from the 1960s, a giant machine with only 4k of memory, and of course some vintage favourites like the BBC Micro. This will be chip tune music unlike any ever produced before. It’s a fantastic privilege to work with such unique and rare computers. For me it is the chance of a lifetime.”
The machines that Matthew will be working with have been restored to full working order by volunteers and researchers at TNMOC.
Kevin Murrell, a director and trustee of THNMOC, explained: “Unlike synthesised computer music, the chip tune musical genre exploits the sounds directly made by computers. Even the earliest 1940s computers could produce sounds -- usually a tone to indicate what they were doing. Very quickly astute operators started to alter tones and make tunes and manufacturers discovered that this was a way of making their machines less foreboding to customers. Machines began to be delivered with music programs as standard and, when computer games became popular, sounds and music from computers became de rigeur.
“Matthew’s project brings a new dimension to TNMOC – and we expect it to attract a new audience to the museum to learn about how technology has advanced so rapidly over recent decades to pervade our everyday lives. We are delighted with his initiative and the support from the PRS Foundation.”
“Visitors to the Museum are always been mesmerised by the clunking and whirring of Colossus, but I never imagined that someone could make music from our rebuild of the world’s first electronic programmable computer,” said Tony Sale, leader of the Colossus Mark 2 rebuild team and trustee of The National Museum of Computing. “I think it’s brilliant and I’d like to know what the original codebreakers would have made of the idea. I suspect it would have appealed to their inventiveness and ingenuity and their curiosity about that mysterious link between mathematics and music.”
Matthew Applegate hopes that this will be the first of many computer music related projects he will bring to the museum. In true Bletchley Park tradition, he cannot give more detail about Obsolete? just yet as it is classified information.www.tnmoc.org
Music type: Electronic
Funding Scheme: New Works
Region: South/South East
Contact:
Kevin Murrell
krmurrell@googlemail.com