darcie-gomer
commented
11 months ago "Christmas carols from Turing's computer"
"Listeners to BBC radio heard an utterly new sound in 1951 — a computer playing music. Among its Christmas fare the BBC broadcast two melodies that, although instantly recognizable, sounded like nothing else on earth. They were Jingle Bells and Good King Wenceslas, played by the mammoth Ferranti Mark I computer that stood in Alan Turing's Computing Machine Laboratory, in Manchester. According to Ferranti’s marketing supremo, Vivian Bowden, it was "the most expensive and most elaborate method of playing a tune that has ever been devised". Bowden may have kicked himself for predicting, at this seminal moment, that computer-generated music had no future." Read more here
Now we hear computer generated music all the time, can you think of any of your favourite Christmas songs that may have been created help from a computer?
Our Christmas newsletter is fast approaching and we will need to link it to computing through history. Another option is to link it to something Ocado or CFL related (with Christmas). We could look back at events we did at the CFCs etc.
Take a look at previous Christmas newsletter to understand what is required and then search for history and puzzles that we could connect to. We will need the introductory section putting together.