Interactions - January/February 2009

This account of ways in which computers have interacted with us via our ears is a welcome first, an over-the-transom, unsolicited Timelines contribution. —Jonathan Grudin

Sound in Computing:
A Short History
Paul Robare

Carnegie Mellon University | paulrobare@cmu.edu

Jodi Forlizzi

Carnegie Mellon University | forlizzi@cs.cmu.edu

[ 1] “The Music
played by CSIRAC.”
University of Melbourne,
Melbourne School
of Engineering,
Department of
Computer Science and
Software Engineering,
15 May 2006. <http://
www.csse.unimelb.edu.
au/dept/about/csirac/
music/ music.html>.

January + February 2009

John Cage is said to have once sat in an anechoic chamber for some time. Upon exiting, Cage remarked to the engineer on duty that after some time he was able to perceive two discrete sounds, one high pitched and one low. The engineer then explained that the high-pitched sound was his nervous system and the low his circulatory system. There really is no escaping sound.

Recently, one of us embarked on a similar experiment with our desktop computer. A surprising number of sounds emanated from the machine: the whirr of the fans, the clicking of the drives, and a whole suite of sounds from the interface, which had previously gone unnoticed. Even more surprising, many of these sounds play informational roles. For example, the fans speed up when the processor is doing double time; the quality of sound changes just before the graphic interface provides an alert.

Though it rarely receives much formal consideration, sound has been a part of computing for as long as digital computers have existed. These days, many designers must make decisions regarding the use of sound in products at some point in their career, but there are few resources regarding how sounds can and should be used. As a result, sound is generally underutilized by designers and under-appreciated by users. To help establish a framework for understanding sound in digital products, this article briefly traces the historical use of sound in computing.

The 1940s, ’50s and ’60s—

Big Systems and Constant Sounds Many of the earliest computers were equipped with a speaker (known as a “hooter”) that could sonify the machine’s operations. The hooters were wired directly into a mainframe’s accumulator (or other likely spot); they produced rhythmic noises that

engineers and operators could passively monitor. In the event of a bug, the noises would change. The interaction paradigm used was thus quite similar to that of a car engine: The user passively monitors a steady-state noise for any change in sound that might signal malfunction.

It was not long before smart people figured out that if it could make noise, it could make music. In 1951 the Mk1 (a hulking mainframe in Sydney, Australia), was used to give the world’s first public computer music performance. According to the University of Melbourne, “The sound production technique used on the CSIR Mk1 was as crude as is possible to imagine on a computer …. However, this occurred when there were no digital-to-analog converters, there was no digital audio practice and little in the way of complete digital audio theories [ 1].”

Musicians, of course, cannot leave a new instrument alone once discovered and thus continued to invent new ways of producing music with computers. In 1964 or 1965, for instance, undergraduate students at Reed College discovered a way to coax music out of the IBM 1620 and later the faster IBM 1130 (a table-sized machine with a whopping 8K of memory and a punch card only interface). The computers generated RF interference that could be picked up and sonified by a nearby radio. A student named Peter Langston developed a way to use this “feature” to produce music; and a friend named Lenny Schrieber wrote an algorithm to produce a specific frequency N by writing code that branched to a new cycle every k/N cycles (k being some constant). Langston recalls that during this time a duet between a classical violinist and the computer was performed for a local news program.