I would imagine when most people think of “computer music” these days they still think of the beeps, boops, and blips of the Atari and early computer systems of the late 70’s and early 80’s. Even by 1983, however, music from computers had come quite a long way, and we were just on the verge of the release of the Compact Disc, which holds a massive (for it’s time) 700 Megabytes of data – in the audio version, this is about 70 minutes of music in a high-quality digital form.
Computers would eventually get CD drives, and the ability to play CD music, as well as compressed forms of CD audio, mp3, flac, aac, and the like: all the formats you use today. Back in 1983 though, we were still mostly at the stage of bips and bleeps (very advanced bips and bleeps), but these sounds were being used in conjunction with keyboards and music tracking software to turn computers into advanced sound synthesizers; this technology helped form the backbone of today’s digital editing in the studio – using computers to edit real audio streams.
As always, this is an older episode, so it’s rather dry, but if you like music, this video will still prove interesting as a slice of time.
Enjoy