The BBC reports that newly found acetate disks contain what is believed to be the earliest known computer music recordings:

The songs were captured by the BBC in the Autumn of 1951 during a visit to the University of Manchester.

The recording has been unveiled as part of the 60th Anniversary of “Baby”, the forerunner of all modern computers.

The tunes were played on a Ferranti Mark 1 computer, a commercial version of the Baby Machine.

“I think it’s historically significant,” Paul Doornbusch, a computer music composer and historian at the New Zealand School of Music, told BBC News.

“As far as I know it’s the earliest recording of a computer playing music in the world, probably by quite a wide margin.”

You can listen to the recording at the BBC site.