From Rhythm to Sound and Music

Abstract

In early 1950s, Iannis Xenakis became the first composer to use stochastic processes to generate pieces of music, working by hand. The first entirely computer-generated composition was Illiac.Suite.for.String.Quartett, realized by Lejaren Hiller in 1956 (Hiller, 1970, 1981). In Hiller’s approach, all kinds of musical processes were coded and implemented by computer. In the ‘80s, David Cope created a computer-aided system allowing anyone to create new compositions in the styles of past composers. The system worked even for users with no skills in programming or composition. Cope thought that computers could be a good tool for studying musical style, encoding it into programs to increase musical creativity. So he began to study the essential elements that define musical style, creating an explicit definition he could encode in a computer program.