''Beethoven's Ninth Symphony'' CD-ROM was one of the first titles to couple a computer

compact disc The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in Oc ...

with an audio CD. This title, a companion to

Beethoven Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 177026 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of the classic ...

's Symphony No. 9, was developed in 1989 by the Voyager Company in Apple Computer's

HyperCard HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, f ...

, using custom audio XCMDs developed at Voyager. The lead instructor and creative voice was

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...

music instructor Robert Winter. ''Beethoven's Ninth Symphony'', while offering black and white images on a 512×342 resolution display, offered full 44 kHz stereo audio by controlling an off-the-shelf audio CD in the CD-ROM player. Historically, ''Beethoven's Ninth Symphony'' is of importance as it was an early example of

interactive media Interactive media normally refers to products and services on digital computer-based systems which respond to the user's actions by presenting content such as text, moving image, animation, video and audio. Since its early conception, various f ...

that reached the consumer market, before the popularization of the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind ...

External links

Article on the history of the ''Beethoven's Ninth Symphony'' CD-ROM
{{Symphony No. 9 Ninth Symphony CD-ROM 1989 software Compact disc