Can Computers Make Music?

Since music is a name given to certain sounds produced by the voice or an instrument, the answer is yes. The idea of constructing a single machine to create and combine electronic sounds as music was developed in 1955 by the Radio Corporation of America.

RCA developed an Electronic Music Synthesizer, which was able to electronically produce all the characteristics of all sounds a human can hear, in any combination they may be heard. A coded card, punched by the synthesizer at a keyboard, carries the program for the sound.

Electronics and musical composition were more recently drawn together by the development of a smaller synthesizer, called a Moog after its inventor, Robert Moog, who developed it in the 1960s.

You are probably familiar with an electronic music synthesizer if you saw the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which scientists and space creatures were shown communicating with each other through electronically produced music.