response. Only after further investiga-
tion and familiarization can deficien-
cies in the work be considered.x
However, Hiller’s work and 1959
Scientific American article17 led to
much controversy and press attention.
Hostility to his achievementsy was
such that the Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musiciansz did not include an ar-
ticle on it until shortly before his death
in 1994. This hostility arose no doubt
more from a misperception of compo-
sitional practice than from anything
intrinsic to Hiller’s work.

Much of the resistance to algorithmic composition that persists to this day stems from the misguided bias that the computer, not the composer, composes the music. In the vast majority of cases where the composer is also the programmer, this is simply not true. As composer and computer musician Curtis Roads pointed out more than 15

 

x To paraphrase Ludger Brümmer, from information theory we know that new information is perceived as chaotic or interesting but not expressive. New information must be structured before it can be understood, and, in the case of aesthetic experience, this structuring involves comparison to an ideal, or an established notion of beauty. 7

y Concerning the reaction to The Illiac Suite, Hiller said “There was a great [deal] of hostility, certainly in the musical world...I was immediately pigeonholed as an ex-chemist who had bungled into writing music and probably wouldn’t know how to resolve a dominant seventh chord”; interview with Vincent Plush, 1983.5

z The Grove is the English-speaking world’s most widely used and arguably most authoritative musicological resource.

years ago, it takes a good composer to design algorithms that result in music that captures the imagination. 34

Furthermore, using algorithmic-composition techniques does not by necessity imply less composition work or a shortcut to musical results; rather, it is a change of focus from note-to-note composition to a top-down formalization of compositional process. Composition is, in fact, often slowed by the requirement that musical ideas be expressed and their characteristics encapsulated in a highly structured and non-musical general programming language. Learning the discipline of programming is itself a time-consuming and, for some composers, an insurmountable problem.

Perhaps counterintuitively, such formalization of personal composition technique allows the composer to proceed from concrete musical or abstract formal ideas into realms hitherto unimagined, sometimes impossible to achieve through any other means than computer software. As composer Helmut Lachenmann wrote, “A composer who knows exactly what he wants, wants only what he knows—and that is one way or another too little.” 35 The computer can help composers overcome recreating what they already know by aiding more thorough investigations of the material, once procedures are programmed, modifications and manipulations are simpler than with pencil and paper. By “pressing buttons, introducing coordinates, and supervising the controls,” to quote Xenakis again, 40 the composer is able to stand back and develop compositional material en masse, applying procedures and assessing, rejecting, accepting, or further processing results of an often-surprising nature. Algorithmic composition techniques clearly further individual musical and compositional development through computer programming-enabled voyages of musical discovery.

 

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Michael Edwards ( [e-mail]) is a reader in Music technology in the school of arts, culture and environment of the university of edinburgh, edinburgh, u.k.

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