Early Computers and Electronic Music?

[LambdaMikel]

I think

The history of trackers

Few music-sequencing softwares have a history as distinctive as the tracker. With the epochal program now arriving in hardware form, we trace the tracker’s lineage, from its humble 8-bit beginnings to its era-defining rave sounds.

musictech.com

Gets the attributation wrong. The first tracker was the 1986 Sound Monitor for the C64 by Chris Hülsbecks

Nameless Algorithm: Computer Music

Computer Music

www.namelessalgorithm.com

I myself probably implemented the world's first Tablature Composer, on an Amstrad CPC 464 in the same year - does that make me a pioneer?? anybody knows an earlier tab composer, please let me know

 

[skate323k137]

Later, the PPG Wave turned into the Waldorf Microwave. Wavetable synthesis is still a popular synthesis method in contemporary synthesizers (no, this is not simply PCM Sample Playback).

I've done a lot w/subtractive and FM, not much with wavetable. I have a standalone tracker (Called the Polyend) that is apparently also a wavetable synth. I should do more with it.

 

[1944GPW]

The Australian CSIRAC computer played electronic music from 1949:
https://cis.unimelb.edu.au/about/csirac/music/music-played

Dennis Garcia was an Australian 70s electro-pop artist who used an IBM 5100 monitoring bio-feedback to control aspects of his music.
I have his 1977 album 'Jive to Stay Alive' (Indigo DGIN 001) and it is really good. One of the better tracks on it is named 'I.B.M. Boogie' in recognition of the computer supplied through an artist's grant from IBM, unfortunately there are only a few tracks of JTSA on Youtube and this isn't one of them.
http://www.bowiedownunder.com/artistconnections/garcia.html

 

[stepleton]

Dennis Garcia was an Australian 70s electro-pop artist who used an IBM 5100 monitoring bio-feedback to control aspects of his music.

Would love to know more about how that worked --- the internet doesn't offer much here. I'll have to try and track down that album to listen to as well. (attn. @voidstar78 )

 

[cjs]

I think

The history of trackers

Few music-sequencing softwares have a history as distinctive as the tracker. With the epochal program now arriving in hardware form, we trace the tracker’s lineage, from its humble 8-bit beginnings to its era-defining rave sounds.

musictech.com

[g]ets the attributation wrong. The first tracker was the 1986 Sound Monitor for the C64 by Chris Hülsbecks.

There seem to be a couple of slightly different meanings of the word "tracker" going around. Wikipedia agrees with the reference above, explaining:

The term tracker derives from Ultimate Soundtracker (the first tracker software[3]) written by Karsten Obarski and released in 1987 by EAS Computer Technik for the Amiga.[4].... Some early tracker-like programs appeared for the MSX (Yamaha CX5M) and Commodore 64, before 1987, such as Chris Huelsbeck's SoundMonitor, but these did not feature sample playback, instead playing notes on the computer's internal synthesizer.

Now this strikes me as rather odd, because in my (8-bit) world, I deal with people using what they call "trackers" all the time, and code including code to play back "tracker-composed" music as part of games as so on. And all of these are invariably for sound chips of various sorts (PSG, FM, etc.), not sample playback. And "tracker," of course, makes me think sound parameters laid out linearly on a screen, usually numerically, and this was both how Ultimate Soundtracker and earlier systems such as SoundMonitor worked. (Compare with Will Harvey's 1983 Music Construction Set, which used standard musical notation. Which, incidentally, blew my mind when I first saw it that year.)

And there's probably an argument to be made that the tracker is really just a user interface for building the core data structures we were using much earlier when doing game programming, the parameter lists we used for playback routines, such as these. I have little doubt that many game developers wrote internal tools to help build these, which seem to me to be "trackers," long before such things were ever released as programs for the public.

 

[cjs]

By the way, while I wasn't much impressed by that "History of trackers" article, it did do me the great favour of leading me to this eight-year-old video demonstrating a tracker written for a TI-82 graphing calculator (which happens to be based on a Z80 chip) doing all the sound output via 1-bit PCM (much the same way the Apple II speaker worked). It's a brilliant piece of programming and, given the nature of the hardware, very retro.

 

[LambdaMikel]

Sorry guys, I shared the German version earlier. But I meant to share the English version:

Impressions from the workshop: