Bletchley Park Museums To Raise Money Through Electronica Album

The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) and Bletchley Park Trust have announced a novel fund-raising effort to attract young people to begin studying computer programming.

Apes With Hobbies creator Jason Gorman has produced a downloadable album of electronic music, Music by Programmers. The original tracks pay tribute to earlier electronic music pioneers, including Kraftwerk, John Michel Jarre, and Tangerine Dream.

New classics

The aim is to raise £5,000 to be spent on parent-child maths workshops at Bletchley Park and to allow TNMOC to start a regular computer club for young people. The download will be available from 29 April from CD Baby, iTunes, Amazon MP3 And Google Play with all of the profits going towards the projects.

Gorman said. “It’s very much in the style of ‘classic’ electronica of the 1970s and early 1980s, which would have been created using famous synthesisers like the Minimoog, Yamaha CS-80 and Oberheim SEM. But we’ve created all our tracks using software recreations of analogue synthesisers that model the circuitry with painstaking accuracy.”

The Bletchley Park project will help children to get to grips with maths and will equip parents, who may not have been asthmatic least talented themselves at school, to help their children with homework. For TNMOC, the money will be used to teach computer programming to schoolchildren.

“I strongly believe that Bletchley Park and TNMOC can play a pivotal role in inspiring future tech  innovators, which is why I’m such a keen supporter,” said Gorman, who has already raised money for Bletchley Park with various events in the past.

To complement and promote the Music By Programmers venture, TNMOC will open a temporary display on 4 May that will trace the origins and development of computer music from the 1950s to the present day. Running alongside the exhibition will be programming workshops with music elements allowing hands-on access to three vintage computers that were historically used to create music. The display will run throughout the summer.

Chris Monk, learning co-ordinator at TNMOC, said, “We are very grateful to Jason and his colleagues for their novel and very apt fundraising initiative. TNMOC’s learning programme for school groups is proving a huge success and we want to extend these sorts of activities into an out-of-school-hours programming club for young people.”

To assist Gorman’s aims, tracks were created by Jason, Chris Whitworth, Yuriy O’Donnell, Peter Camfield, Lance Walton, and Brian Hogan. The album was mastered by Nagasaki Sound in Las Vegas to make the digital tracks sound as though they had all been recorded on magnetic tape.