365 days project.

I first encountered Music From Mathematics on a website project known as 365 days. The project set out to feature an mp3 a day of musical rarities during the year of 2003. A selection of tracks from the album appeared in mp3 format on day 206 of the project.

The tracks from Music From Mathematics stood out from the other mp3s of corporate musicals, school bands, religious oddities, vanity recordings and general novelty pieces that were featured on other days. The noises generated by IBM's giant 1960s mainframe computer seemed to have a resonance with contemporary music - a distant ancestor of modern day electronic music.

The commentary by Phil Clark of UbuWeb describes the music on the album as a mixture of strange, other-worldly blips, rushing white noise, tootly reworkings of classical pieces and a marvelous period singing computer version of A Bicycle Made For Two.

These blips and noises were inspiring to hear - especially when some further web research revealed a fascinating world of giant obsolete computers, more often used by faceless boffins during the space race or the cold war of the i960s, than by members of the musical avantgarde and pioneers of digital audio.

Music From Mathematics.

The LP Music From Mathematics Played by IBM 7090 Computer and Digital To Sound Transducer was originally released on Decca Records and published by Brunswick (UK) in 1962.

The four tracks I chose to use from the album are:
Bicycle Built For Two (arranged by M. V. Mathews)
Five Against Seven - Random Canon (J. R. Pierce)
Numerology (M. V. Mathews)
Pitch Variations (N. Guttman)

For further information about these tracks please refer to the full liner notes available at 317x.com. More details about the composers and arrangers, the IBM 7090 computer and the development of the film can be found in the Archive and Credits section of this website.