On February 23rd, 1924, Lejaren Hiller was born in New York City. Hiller would become recognized as one of the pioneers of algorithmic composition. In 1957 he wrote the first major computer assisted composition. The Illiac Suite was composed using University of Illinois’ Illiac computer.

Actual work on this problem was started [...]

DarwinTunes is a computer program developed by Dr Bob MacCallum, a bioinformatician at Imperial College London. In the first instance DarwinTunes does three things. It stores a lot of computer-generated songs on a server, presents the songs to the world via a web interface, and allows people to listen to and rate them.

So far [...]

This piece unites Cage’s conception of graph music with ideas from the field of swarm intelligence. The software uses a graph of notated musical fragments to generate a score in real-time, for live performance. It does this by allowing a swarm of virtual insects to crawl over the graph, choosing new fragments with each move.