In 1961 at Bell Labs, Max Mathews, John Kelly, and Carol Lochbaum made an IBM 704 sing 'Daisy Bell' — the first synthesized computer song

In 1961 at Bell Telephone Laboratories, three researchers made a computer — an IBM 704 — produce sung human speech for the first time. John Kelly and Carol Lochbaum programmed the machine's synthesized "vocal" (the vocal-tract model that generated the voice), and Max Mathews — later called the "Father of Computer Music" — supplied the musical accompaniment. The song they chose was "Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)", an 1892 Victorian music-hall tune written by Harry Dacre. Per the Library of Congress essay, the three "made, for the first time, an artificial device 'sing.'"

The recording is the origin point of computer-generated singing. Its immediate cultural afterlife is large out of proportion to the party-trick occasion: a visitor to the lab wrote it into science fiction as HAL 9000's death song, and Mathews's own name was later attached to a visual programming language (claim-max-msp-named-after-max-mathews), which shares the patch-cord dataflow metaphor with LabVIEW. John Kelly, one of the two programmers, was an ex-Navy physics PhD who also co-developed the Kelly Criterion with Claude Shannon — a separate thread from the same room.