Dice Music#

The Musikalisches Würfelspiel (German for musical dice game) was popular in the 18th century for adding an element of chance to music composition. Typically, composers would prepare a set of musical phrases and use a dice to randomly put them in sequence.

Algorithm 3 (Dice Music)

Inputs: The desired length of the piece \(n \in \mathbb{N}\).

Output: A musical piece consisting of \(n\) phrases.

  1. Prepare a palette of musical phrases or notes which we can choose from.

  2. Start with an empty piece.

  3. If the song is shorter than your desired length:

    1. Randomly select a piece of music from the palette, and add it to the piece.

    2. Repeat step 3.

  4. return the piece.

We can do something like this quite easily, by using SuperCollider to randomly pick out a sequence of notes to construct a piece. Of course, even if we constrain the process by using only notes from a certain scale, the result sounds quite random.

(
Pbind(
    \instrument, \default,
    \degree, Pwhite(0, 7),
    \root, 3,
    \scale, Scale.minor,
    \dur, 0.15
).play
)

TODO