Computer Assisted Composition today.
Gérard Assayag · 1998
The first computer experiments on musical composition were carried in the middle of the Fifties. In 1956 R. C. Pinkerton suggested a stochastic composition system which he called the banal tunemaker . He used 39 existing folk melodies, as a material that he submitted to random choices by launching dices. This work, as well as an implementation of Mozart’s dice game by D. A. Caplin in 1955, was a source of inspiration for J. Cohen and J. Sowa who developed soon after their so-called Machine to Compose Music , a computer program, which used in much the same way a set of simple piano pieces.