Computing While Composing

The field of computer music can be thought of as having two fundamental branches, one concerned with the manipulation of musical sounds, and the other concerned with symbolic representations of music. The two are iconized by Max Mathews’s MUSIC program and Lejaren Hiller’s ILIAC Suite, both of 1957, although both have important antecedents. The two branches might provisionally be given the names “Computer Generated Music” (Denis Baggi’s term for it) and “Computer Aided Composition”— or CGM and CAC for short. (In France the latter is called “Composition Aidée par Ordinateur”. The corresponding English acronym, “CAC”, is less than mellifluous and someday we should settle on a better one.) As a field, CAC has flown a very different trajectory from CGM. While in the United States the great strides between 1957 and 1980 were on the CGM side, in Europe during the same period we saw work by Xenakis (starting as early as 1962), Koenig (Project 1, 1964), and many others that, taken together, can be seen as the first proof that CAC could be widely useful in creating new music. Meanwhile in the United States, many people, myself included, thought of CAC as a topic of computer science research, not likely ever to give rise to tools useful to musicians. Interest in CAC has grown in the USA in the intervening years, but excepting the brilliant example of David Cope, work in the USA on this topic has lagged behind that in Europe. Today CGM is ubiquitous and CAC appears futuristic. An entire generation of composers and other musicians has learned to use the computer to synthe-