Mockingboard v1 Sound Card

Norbert Math
Type A for Gunshot

A first-generation computer was practically anything but an everyday object. The giant Colossus computer in Bletchley Park had just enabled the Allied victory by helping to decipher the secret codes of the German Army. And even though this knowledge was a military secret in the 1950s, the designers continued working in the civil sector. The war was over, but a new war broke out, the Cold War. And who if not a perfect brain, an electronic brain, could banish this external and internal threat? The electronic brain was seen as superhuman and yet still in human terms. Even today, we use the term “memory”.

The memories of first-generation computers are tubes filled with quicksilver in which ultrasonic signals are sent from one end to the other. Arriving at the opposite end, the signal is amplified electronically and stored in the input. This creates a cycle of information units consisting of sound waves. What could be more obvious, therefore, than to attach a loudspeaker to the circuit and to listen to this flow of data? Thanks to skilful transposition, the loudspeaker, known by the name “Hooter”, communicates impressions of the inner life of the computer. If the loudspeaker can indicate the condition of a running program, it is also possible to write a program that is capable of humming tuned notes. The idea was probably first implemented in Australia, and it was at the First Conference on Automatic Computing Machines in Melbourne in 1951 that music played by computer was performed for the first time. The program contained arias and well-known tunes such as Colonel Bogey and Thank You for the Memory – included as thanks to the engineers for a memory upgrade that had just been authorized.¹

In the 1960s, Max Matthews of Bell Labs developed the first programs that began to make full use of the compositional and acoustic potential of computers (he was one of the first to use a digital-to-sound converter, a kind of sound card). At the same time, likewise in John Kelly's Bell Labs, a speech synthesizer was being developed that enabled computers to speak and sing. Kelly and Matthews demonstrated this ability with the old song, Daisy Bell, and the screenwriter Arthur Clark was so impressed that he used the same song in a scene in his film 2001 – A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). The fictitious computer HAL 9000, monitoring a spaceship mission, tries to kill the crew after making an error in order to escape the dilemma between its own fault and its theoretical infallibility. One man survives and deactivates HAL’s memory cells – and HAL’s last words, his electronic swan song, are Daisy Bell. HAL, in terms of intention a descendant of the Colossus that decided the war, did not know that infallibility can only apply to stereotype, hence unintelligent functions. “In other words then,” as Alan Turing was the first to note, “if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.”²

The 1970s saw the creation of the first systems that were able to output sound in real-time. An early example is the Audio Sample And Hold developed by Paul DeMarinis on the basis of an idea by Don Buchla. By analogy with the quicksilver tubes of the early years, sound is “frozen” and can be transposed and reproduced. The 1980s brought the computer into the home. HAL and Colossus have shrunk to the size of breadboxes. The military weapon has become a war toy, and it is the computer game that demands sound. The type of sound is shown by the manual for the Mockingboard sound card:³ “Select SOUND EFFECTS DEMONSTRATION from the menu. […] Type A for GUNSHOT. […] Type B for MACHINE GUN.”⁴

The computer might have ended the world war, but it brought the small war into the living room.

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