Arnold Schoenberg designed a musical typewriter that transcribed complex compositions with a simple keyboard.

Arnold Schoenberg's atonal music influenced generations of musicians who followed.

Arnold Schoenberg expanded the confines of music by abandoning traditional chords and embracing dissonance.

Type out a tone and play it back with this fun game

Compose an original piece of music from your phone or desktop with this simple, super fun interface: Just start typing, discover the various sounds associated with each key or letter, and then press play. Go back, tweak, delete, and revise to your...

The QWERTY layout first appeared in the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, sold starting in 1874 by the E. Remington and Sons gun manufacturer, which was looking to diversify after the Civil War.

Fed up with difficult audiences, Arnold Schoenberg started a private concert club that prohibited audible reactions.

Browse the paintings of Arnold Schoenberg, the classical composer who also explored expressionist painting.

Arnold Schoenberg was superstitious about the number 13 and died on Friday the 13th, 1951.

An electric pipe organ in Germany is playing a song for 639 years

Created by composer John Cage, the Halberstadt organ first began playing the piece in September 2001, and has since made only nine chord changes. The device within a medieval church utilizes compressed air to play continuous tones. The next chord change is scheduled for August 2026.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

Arnold Schoenberg's experimentations with dissonance and sound influenced the way films are scored.

Arnold Schoenberg, a pioneer of modern music, and painter Wassily Kandinsky, a pioneer of abstract art, were close friends who inspired one another's work.

The Bauhaus designer who predicted the future of graphic design

László Moholy-Nagy believed that technology would eventually turn typesetting into a process that allowed fonts to be easily modified rather than manually constructed. This history from the American Institute of Graphic Arts digs into how Moholy-Nagy arrived at those prescient theories.

Among the smallest mass-produced mechanical calculators in history, the Curta was designed by Austrian engineer Curt Herzstark while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.

What is a harpsichord?

The harpsichord is the precursor to today's piano, an accompanying instrument first developed in the Early Middle Ages. Rather than struck with hammers (like a piano), the strings of a harpsichord are plucked, producing a bright, consistent tone. The instrument provided harmony in ensemble music during the Renaissance and Baroque periods and featured prominently in opera.

Arnold Schoenberg invented a variation of chess that mimicked geopolitics.

The first commercially successful calculating machine—the arithmometer—was patented in 1820 but not mass-produced for over three decades, likely because its inventor was focused on his insurance business.

One of the first mechanical calculators—the Pascaline—was built in the 1640s by French mathematician Blaise Pascal to help his father, who worked as a tax collector.

Watch how the Enigma machine encrypts messages and learn about its critical design flaw

Using settings selected from a series of rotors and a plugboard that let operators swap letters with any of their choosing, the machine lit up the output letter for each letter typed. While this system could generate messages requiring any of 150 quintillion potential keys, the machine's reflector never encrypted a letter as itself, providing an entry point for exploiting the system.

Listen to Arnold Schoenberg's Holocaust tribute, 'A Survivor from Warsaw.'

The history and operation of SIGABA, the US counterpart of the Nazi Enigma machine

Developed by the US Army and US Navy, over 10,000 of these machines were deployed by the end of World War II to encrypt messages for the armed forces using three series of rotors. The device would continue to be used until the 1950s, while personal computers were shown to possess enough computing power to crack it by 2021.

The Antikythera mechanism: The oldest-known analog computer

A device now considered the world's oldest computer was pulled from a shipwreck more than 120 years ago. Known as the "Antikythera Mechanism," it is now believed to have allowed precise tracking of astronomical positions, and its sophistication overturned understanding of Ancient Greek capabilities.

Use generative AI to create a musical track from a text prompt

Suno, a web-based, text-to-music generator, takes a prompt—such as a music style, along with a general lyric idea—and can produce a highly polished, realistic-sounding tune in a matter of seconds.

More than 2,000 years ago, a hand-powered model of the solar system called the Antikythera mechanism—the oldest example of an analog computer—could predict solar eclipses.

Broadway's songwriters began experimenting in the 1920s

Broadway’s early decades were heavily influenced by opera and vaudeville, but songwriters in the 1920s began exploring more narrative-based songwriting and psychologically complex characters. That trend would continue in the following decades, though it would evolve in even more nuanced ways.

Turing machines consist of an infinite tape, a read-write mechanism and instructions

Based on the information the mechanism reads on the tape, the machine follows the applicable instruction (e.g., if you read a 1, write a 0) and may proceed to the next cell of data. Given enough time and memory, Alan Turing proposed such a machine could perform any computation.

Designed in 1937 by Harvard graduate student Howard H. Aiken, the 'Harvard Calculator' was used by the US Navy to solve advanced physics problems.

Create flute, saxophone, trumpet, or violin reproductions of any 15-second piece of audio using machine learning.

Ray Bradbury wrote 'Fahrenheit 451,' his landmark dystopian novel, on a rented typewriter in the basement of a UCLA library.

Before transistors, which regulate the flow of electricity, vacuum tubes—glass tubes containing no gas that resemble light bulbs—served as the electronic switches in computers.

The Bauhaus school developed a sleek typography that intentionally contrasted Nazi propaganda.

Watch an interview with Philip Glass about his career and theory of creativity, which he believes needs to be consistently deconstructed and reinvented.

The Macintosh popularized GUI and mouse navigation for personal computing

A graphical user interface that utilized windows, icons, and pull-down menus, rather than text-based commands, contributed to the device's success after its January 1984 launch. Its original sound system—capable of playing four voices—was developed after non-technical staff suggested the machine should play music.

The first compiler to facilitate communication with computers was developed by Grace Hopper

The A-0 program linker automatically translated mathematical symbols into machine-readable binary code. Although it took two years for computer executives to get on board with the idea, the technology was foundational to future programming languages that allowed computers to understand commands written in word-based languages.

Unsatisfied with the designs provided by an Apple engineer, Steve Jobs designed the original Mac calculator in about 10 minutes.

Listen to a jazz composition triggered by the New York City Subway

A creative coder created a (synthetic) jazz ensemble that uses the locations of the city's trains to determine its performance. It's both a fascinating bit of internet culture and a fitting homage to New York, one of jazz's major hubs.

The Model K—named for its construction on a kitchen table—was the first electromechanical digital binary adder, which used an electric circuit to provide the sum of a pair of zeroes and ones in binary.

Exploring Oskar Schlemmer's 'Triadic Ballet,' a Bauhaus-inspired performance piece

The "symphonic dance of threeness" brought together Bauhaus' varied artistic interests and offered a fable in which collectivism wins. This history and timeline of the work details its origins as well as its near-destruction at the hands of the Nazis, who considered it profane.

All computers are defined by their ability to input, store, process, and output data

From wooden machines to wearable tech, computers have changed a lot in appearance, but they all still perform the same essential tasks. Early computers were made of wood and metal—some were so big that they filled entire rooms just to solve simple math problems.