Pierre Barbaud (French, 1911–1990) Algorithme 1 — Musique extraite du film 'Imprévisibles Nouveautés', 1960
Vinyl 10-inch, 33⅓ RPM, mono, with 12-page booklet
Critère CRD 430, France
MUS.2026.105
Description
A ten-inch record of computer-composed music from 1960 — contemporary with Hiller and Isaacson's Illiac Suite, and the earliest algorithmic music in this collection. The four untitled sides carry the score Barbaud wrote with Roger Blanchard for the industrial film Imprévisibles Nouveautés, produced by Roland Douatte and issued by Critère in France as CRD 430. It comes with a twelve-page booklet.
Barbaud had turned to automatic composition two years earlier, running his programs on Bull's machines in Paris; he was the first in France and the second anywhere, after Hiller, to compose systematically by computer. That a record of it exists at all in 1960, and that the music was made for a film about industrial novelty, is the whole period in one object.
He is also the man who got Vera Molnár into the computing centre at Orsay in 1968 — see the note on her Tango 74.
Sleeve image from the Discogs release entry (r5050829) pending a photograph of the copy in hand.
