‘He touched a nerve’: how the first piece of AI music was born in 1956

Long before Auto-Tune and deepfake compositions, university professor Lejaren Hiller premiered a concert recital composed by a computer and became an overnight celebrity

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.