Museum of Computing Machinery

Exiting the first room, you will find yourself in a smaller room, with a large red cabinet to your left: the control unit of TAU 2. TAU2 was a sound synthesis system created in Pisa in 1975 at the CNR's Institute of Information Processing. Its authorship belongs to Pietro Grossi, an Italian cellist, composer, and programmer, a pioneer of electronic music and computer music. He was a visionary who, from the early 1960s, imagined how electronic processors could create music if properly programmed. TAU2 was a polyphonic and polytimbral audio synthesis equipment capable of simultaneously producing 12 sounds, it was a special terminal connected like any other peripheral to the IBM 370. The system allowed for storing, composing, re-elaborating, and performing musical pieces in real time. The simulator with IBM monitor in front of the control unit allows you to listen to examples of music playback, processing with filters, frequency, and speed modifiers.