ABSTRACT

The reason that randomness has gained so much popularity in the computer age is probably because computers can actually do better than just throwing a die or tossing a coin: they can be programmed to perform testing on the randomly produced material in order to assess its suitability for the piece in question. Moreover, as an alternative to the random-and-test process, musicians can design programs that embed compositional constraints within the random process itself. One way to do this is to use probabilities.