Long before Auto-Tune and deepfake compositions, university professor Lejaren Hiller premiered a concert recital composed by a computer and became an overnight celebrity
![‘He touched a nerve’: how the first piece of AI music was born in 1956](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9ba053f744ceea2fab71967a1701fad3901d6bfc/434_385_3680_2206/master/3680.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=dc974c78835ff76eaaf18247ac23bd96)
On 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. 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.
Decades 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.