Bletchley Park Raises Funds With Synthesised Synthesiser Album

A group of programmers called Music By Programmers, have released an album to raise money to fund maths and programming workshops at The National Museum of Computing, based at Bletchley Park in Oxfordshire.

The group has made the album in members’ free time in the hope that the £5000 it aims to raise will enable the Museum to offer classes and workshops that encourage the next generation of young people to learn programming techniques from the ground up, citing innovating musicians such as Jean Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream and the forefathers of electronica, Kraftwerk, as influencing not only music, but programming computers in general.

The eight tracks, all written by the group’s members, use sounds initially created by such luminary devices as the MiniMoog, Yamaha CS-80 and Oberheim SEM. These ‘instruments’ now cost thousands of pounds but the software designed to simulate their sounds has been created for just £337.

Jason Gorman, founder of Music By Programmers, said in a press release:

 “It’s very much in the style of ‘classic’ electronica of the 1970s and early 1980s. But we’ve created all our tracks using software recreations of those famous analogue synthesizers that model the circuitry with painstaking accuracy.”

He continued that, despite the synthesiser sounds being a reproduction of the originals, they were practically indistinguishable.

If the fundraising target of £5000 is achieved, it will pay for both parent-child workshops at Bletchley Park, home of the World War II ‘codebreakers’ and their most famous member Alan Turing, plus a new programming club at The National Museum of Computing – in our opinion, a small price to pay for the next generation of technology.

The Music By Programmers album is available to download from 29^th April on CD Baby, Amazon, Google Play and iTunes.

For more information, see the Music By Programmers website.