COPElAND & lONG | 237
To the astonishment of onlookers, the computer raucously hooted out the British national
anthem, God Save the King.^25 A budding programmer could hardly have thought of a better
way to get attention. A few weeks later Max Newman heard the computer grinding out God
Save the King and quickly wrote a letter to Strachey suggesting he might like a programming
job in the lab.^26
Manchester’s musical computer also caught the attention of the popular press, with head-
lines like ‘Electronic brain can sing now’.^27 The accompanying article explained that ‘the
world’s most powerful brain’ had been ‘given a coded version of the score’, from which it ‘con-
structed the necessary waveform’. The BBC sent a recording team, together with a Children’s
Hour radio presenter known as Auntie, to capture a performance by the computer.^28 As well
as God Save the King, the BBC recorded a version of Glenn Miller’s In the Mood, a reedy and
wooden performance of the famous hit. There was also an endearing, if rather brash, rendition
of the nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep. The Mark II, still full of glitches, managed to crash
in the middle of its Glenn Miller party piece: ‘The machine’s obviously not in the mood’, Auntie
gushed.
The unedited BBC recording of the session conveys a sense of people interacting with some-
thing entirely new. ‘The machine resented that’, Auntie observed at one point. The idea of a
thinking machine, an electronic brain, was in the air at Manchester. Turing merrily fanned
the flames. He provocatively told a reporter from The Times that he saw no reason why the
computer should not ‘enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect, and
eventually compete on equal terms’.^29
Max Newman, now Professor of Mathematics at Manchester and founder of the Computing
Machine Laboratory, lectured on the new computer music to 250 professional musicians who
attended the annual conference of the Incorporated Society of Musicians in 1952, and his lecture
was reported in the national press.^30 After explaining that to make the Manchester computer
play melodies, ‘All you have to do is to send an instruction to the hooter with the frequency
of the note you want it to play’, Newman described the discovery that the computer could be
programmed to compose tunes for itself. So far these were, he admitted, ‘very bad tunes’. (Quite
possibly the program used Turing’s random number generator, a standard hardware compo-
nent of the Ferranti computers.) According to the Manchester Guardian:^31
The next step, said Professor Newman, would be to make a machine which could compose good
tunes, but so far no method of bridging the gap had been devised.
The article continued:
Professor Newman ended with this note of comfort for the assembled musicians: ‘All this
appears much more alarming and dangerous than it really is. When you see how it is done and
how far it is from genuine composition, composers will realise they need not start taking steps to
protect themselves against competition from machines.’
Extract from Turing’s programming manual
Turing’s brief tutorial in his Programmers’ Handbook on how to program musical notes was
typically compressed and demanding—yet, equally typically, his terse account told readers
everything they needed to know in order to start writing note-playing programs. Turing called