Computers weren’t completely foreign to the field at that time. Sixty five years later, the Illiac Suite has gone back to being largely unknown outside certain classical, experimental and academic circles, but it marked a historic first step towards the world of computerisation and AI in music. Photograph: Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives ‘It would have been a big point of pride that the computer was being used in this way’. “He was very famous for 15 minutes,” Bohn says. “One week I was nobody, and the next week I was notorious.” Biographer James Matthew Bohn recalls stories of Hiller’s phone “ringing almost off the hook” in the aftermath of the performance. “I went from total obscurity as a composer to really being on the front page of newspapers all over the country,” he told an interviewer in 1983. Hiller, the man primarily responsible for the Illiac Suite, became an overnight celebrity, appearing in Time magazine and Newsweek. “Some people didn’t dig the beat,” the article claimed, citing one unnamed audience member who likened the music to a barnyard and another who feared “it does away with the need for human composers”. It referred to the piece as “a suite composed by an electronic brain” that was “sponsored” by Hiller and his research associate Leonard M Isaacson. The following day, a wire story published by the United Press cast the show, which lasted 15 minutes, in a contentious light.
“It would have been a big point of pride that the computer was being used in this way,” he says. Now 89, Andrix remembers an auditorium packed with people “who showed up to see what this monster of a computer could do.” The Illiac I, short for Illinois Automatic Computer, was the first supercomputer to be housed by an academic institution. One of the four musicians who performed the piece that night was George Andrix, a violist and composition student at the university.
Student performances didn’t usually attract so many people, but this was an exceptional case, the debut of the Illiac Suite: String Quartet No 4, that a member of the chemistry faculty, Lejaren Hiller Jr, had devised with the school’s one and only computer, the Illiac I.ĭecades before today’s artificial intelligence pop stars, Auto-Tune and deepfake compositions was Hiller’s piece, described by the New York Times in his 1994 obituary as “the first substantial piece of music composed on a computer” – and indeed by a computer. O n the evening of 9 August 1956, a couple of hundred people squeezed into a student union lounge for a concert recital at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, about 130 miles outside Chicago.