Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
well that every piece it creates sounds Mozartian in style, due to Mozart's
deep understanding of the musical style of his period. Implementations
of the dice game that have been made available on the Internet demon-
strate that the music sounds quite natural.
13
Several musical dice games were printed and reprinted in many parts
of Europe during the latter part of the eighteenth century and represent
the first efforts at algorithmic composition—the creation of music us-
ing a clearly defined algorithm. This idea was taken further in 1821 by
the Dutch inventor Diederich Winkel, who had previously built some
weaving machines and discovered a way of producing an almost infinite
variety of fabric patterns. Winkel designed and built a mechanical device
for algorithmic composition, called the Componium (see
Figure 14
)
, en-
dowed not only with a sound of excellent quality, but also with the capa-
bility of repeatedly improvising new variations on a given musical theme
of 80 measures.
The improvisation process was based on two complementary syn-
chronised musical cylinders, each having its musical measures alternating
so that two measures of silence were followed by two of musical notation,
arranged so that one cylinder played the two measures of music while the
other was silent. Both cylinders continued to move throughout the com-
position process, with the “non-playing” cylinder at any moment using
its silent time to move, under the control of a randomly moving “pro-
grammer”, to a different position, while the other cylinder was playing
its two measures.
The cylinders were studded with pins in such a way that, to the right
of the pins that represented a given theme, there were pins represent-
ing seven variations on that theme. The alternation of the cylinders was
arranged in such a way that two measures of a variation of one of the
eight motifs
14
on one of the cylinders could be followed by two mea-
sures of a variation of one of the eight motifs from the other cylinder.
Gears and spiral movements of the mechanism, together with variations
in timbre as well as of the measures of music, meant that so many differ-
ent musical combinations could be created by the Componium that, if
five minutes was allowed for the performance of each piece, it would have
taken more than 138 trillion years for all the musical combinations to be
played.
13
For example at http://sunsite.uniview.ac.at/Mozart/dice/.
14
The eight motifs were the original and the seven sets of variations.
