The First Song of Machines

– Bicycle for the Mind In nineteen sixty one, something extraordinary

happened. Inside a laboratory at Bell Labs, a machine found its voice.

Not through breath. Not through lungs. But through numbers. An IBM seven zero nine four computer

became the first machine in history to sing. Its song was simple. Fragile.

Almost uncertain. Yet in that moment, mathematics became melody. The engineers did

not just write code. They counted pulses. Shaped waveforms by hand. Taught silicon and

wire how to express something that had once belonged only to living beings. They taught a machine

to breathe in sound. The song was Daisy Bell. A melody from another century.