{"id":24118,"date":"2023-01-31T16:55:15","date_gmt":"2023-01-31T15:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/?p=179393"},"modified":"2023-01-31T17:33:48","modified_gmt":"2023-01-31T16:33:48","slug":"ada-lovelace-how-the-maths-genius-saw-the-future-of-music","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/rss_feed\/ada-lovelace-how-the-maths-genius-saw-the-future-of-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Ada Lovelace: how the maths genius saw the future of music"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 19th-century mathematician and musician Ada Lovelace was the first to spot computers\u2019 creative potential. David De Roure tells her intriguing story and explores the impact of her legacy <\/p>

By BBC Music Magazine\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Tuesday, 31 January 2023 at 12:00 am<\/p>

\n\n

A computer that composes music? Even in our era of advanced technology, the possibility that a machine might\u00a0 <\/span>be able to create original works of art is one that\u2019s stretching the world\u2019s brightest scientists, artists and programmers. Yet it\u2019s arguably an idea as old as computing itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ever since the first incarnation of the computer, back in the 19th century, its power beyond the realm of numbers has been recognised.<\/span><\/p>\n

Who was Ada Lovelace?<\/span><\/h2>\n

\nThe person who first identified its potential was Ada Lovelace, a pioneer of computer programming, and today an important role model for women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lovelace\u2019s programming credentials are unique and remarkable but the extent of her accomplishment is even more exciting and significant. While she studied maths and understood computation with perceptions well ahead of her time, she grasped that computers could do more than process numbers. She saw that they could also reach into our social and creative lives \u2013 and might even one day generate music. But how did she come to draw this groundbreaking conclusion?<\/span><\/p>\n

When was Ada Lovelace born and who were her parents?<\/h2>\n

Perhaps it was in part down to her two very different parents, one artistic, the other scientific in inclination. Augusta Ada was born in December 1815, the only child of an unhappy and short-lived marriage between the infamous Romantic poet Byron and the strictly moral and mathematically educated Anne Isabella Milbanke.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ada never knew her father and was brought up by her mother, following her educational path which focused on music, French and mathematics. Ada\u2019s impressive array of teachers and mentors included the renowned polymath and writer Mary Somerville, who was the first person to be described in print as a \u2018scientist\u2019 \u2013 because \u2018man of science\u2019 was thought inappropriate \u2013 and along with astronomer Caroline Herschel was one of the first female members of the Royal Astronomical Society. Another famous tutor, Augustus De Morgan, is a name familiar today to any student of logic.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lovelace\u2019s intellect was formidable. \u2018That Enchantress who has thrown her magic spell around the most abstract of Sciences has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects (in our country at least) could have exerted,\u2019 reported the mathematician Charles Babbage, one of a circle of intellectuals with whom she was friends. <\/span><\/p>\n

Ada Lovelace \u2013 as she became when her husband William King, whom she married at the age of 20, became the first Earl of Lovelace \u2013 knew the scientists Michael Faraday, Charles Wheatstone, nurse and social reformer Florence Nightingale and novelist Charles Dickens.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lovelace and Babbage<\/span><\/h2>\n

But it was Lovelace\u2019s friendship with Babbage that is pivotal to this story. They met through Somerville in 1833, when Lovelace was 17 and Babbage was 42. <\/span><\/p>\n

In the 1820s, Babbage had invented his first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, which he took delight in making the centrepiece of his soir\u00e9es. De Morgan\u2019s wife, Sophia, later wrote: \u2018While other visitors gazed at the working of this beautiful instrument with the sort of expression, and I dare say the sort of feeling, that some savages are said to have shown on first seeing a looking-glass or hearing a gun\u2026 Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Babbage was an exceptional polymath and engineer, and the next computer he designed, the steam-powered Analytical Engine, remarkably anticipated the design of computers that would come a century later. It was never built but Lovelace engaged closely with Babbage and this hypothetical machine and the fruits of their collaboration appeared in print in 1843. <\/span><\/p>\n

Babbage had presented the design in a talk in Turin, transcribed into French by Luigi Menabrea, an Italian general and mathematician who was later to serve as the prime minister of Italy. Lovelace was already an expert on the design and back in London she was invited to translate Notions sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage <\/i>(Elements of Charles Babbage\u2019s Analytical Machine) into English. In the process she tripled the length by adding her \u2018Translator\u2019s Notes\u2019 \u2013 and these have become her enduring contribution to computing.<\/span><\/p>\n

In those notes is the first published computer program, for which Lovelace is most famous today. But while her contemporaries were focused on the computer for calculation, Lovelace transcended this immediate ambition and offered other extraordinary insights.<\/span><\/p>\n

How Lovelace saw the computing potential for music<\/h2>\n

In \u2018Note A\u2019 Lovelace suggests the Analytical Engine \u2018might act upon other things besides number\u2026 Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent\u2019.<\/p>\n

What did Lovelace mean by \u2018scientific pieces of music\u2019? Did she mean that the music would be systematic, given the established rules of harmony<\/strong><\/a> and counterpoint? <\/span><\/p>\n

Or perhaps it would be lacking in expression, being generated by a machine and not by a human? Of course, science and music had long been entwined \u2013 the notion of scientific music predates Lovelace, and humans can compose \u2018scientific\u2019 music too. <\/span><\/p>\n

Christian Huygens, the 17th-century Dutch scientist, railed against it, wishing that composers \u2018would not seek what is the most artificial or most difficult to invent, but what affects the ear most\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

A possible interpretation is the use of the systems exercised in canons and fugues, where the music repeats patterns which are transposed, inverted and reversed. <\/span><\/p>\n

For example, in a \u2018crab canon\u2019 the same line is played backwards and forwards simultaneously, and in JS Bach<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s The Musical Offering <\/i>one player turns the music upside down. Lovelace was also interested in \u2018magic squares\u2019, the ancient puzzle of assembling numbers in a square so that adding up rows, columns or diagonals gives the same number. These have since been used in music by composers such as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies<\/a><\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Was Ada Lovelace musical?<\/h2>\n

It is no surprise that Lovelace was thinking about the relationship between maths, machines and music. She was a pianist, singer and dedicated harpist, and her letters show that she put music on a par with maths. In 1837 she told Somerville, \u2018I play four or five hours generally, and never less than three\u2019. <\/span><\/p>\n

Lovelace also sponsored the young John Thomas, who was to become a major virtuoso-composer harpist in the 19th century, appointed to Queen Victoria <\/a><\/strong>and whose works, such as The Minstrel\u2019s Adieu to his Native Land<\/i>, are popular pieces today. Lovelace was proud of her voice and we know she sang arias from Bellini<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Norma<\/i>, fashionable in the 1830s, to an audience in her library.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also in \u2018Note A\u2019, Lovelace writes that \u2018we may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves\u2019, reminding us that she had seen the Jacquard looms in operation. Their use of punched cards for programming was destined to be adopted in the Analytical Engine, well ahead of their mid 20th-century manifestation in mainframe computers.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it is Lovelace\u2019s comments in \u2018Note G\u2019 that have provoked most debate. She states that \u2018the Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform\u2019. In other words, even if their capabilities can be applied to the arts, computers can\u2019t come up with anything fundamentally new.<\/span><\/p>\n

Alan Turing disputed what he called \u2018Lady Lovelace\u2019s Objection\u2019 in his seminal 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence<\/i>, while Margaret Boden, one of today\u2019s polymaths, defined \u2018the Lovelace Questions\u2019 in her 1990 book The Creative Mind<\/i>. She teased apart the differences between computers helping human creativity, appearing creative, recognising creativity, and creating. With the rising adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in computing today, these questions are more salient than ever.<\/span><\/p>\n

When did Ada Lovelace die?<\/h2>\n

Lovelace\u2019s life was cut short by cancer at the age of 36 in 1852. <\/span><\/p>\n

What could she have achieved if she had lived longer?<\/h2>\n

We don\u2019t know what she would have done next, but we can enjoy speculation in Sydney Padua\u2019s graphic novel The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage <\/i>(2015), and Gibson and Sterling\u2019s The Difference Engine<\/i> (1990), the founding novel of the steampunk genre. <\/span><\/p>\n

The recent Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist<\/i> by Hollings, Martin and Rice provides compelling evidence for Lovelace\u2019s iconic status in science, technology, engineering and maths.<\/span><\/p>\n