Robert Keefe, who teaches music at Ithaca College in New York State, has synthesized a musical transposition of the movement of Venus from July 19, 1595 to Oct. 1, 1596, viewed from Graz in Austria. His second piece, De Stella Nova, is a polyphonic version of the movement of eight planets, from Mercury to Pluto, from left to right in the stereo space, from data derived from the movements of the planets.

Additional projects not covered in the lecture

Stephen W. Smoliar, currently Director of the Video Classification Project at the Institute of Systems Science of the National University of Singapore, has given to the special issue of IEEE COMPUTER his contribution Algorithms for Musical Composition: A Question of Granularity, in which he discusses and criticizes the choice units, terminals or granules, which a system generates - e.g., notes - and proposes that the appropriate level should depend on the musical context, which too often gets ignored.

The following have been published in the book Readings in Computer Generated Music mentioned above, which contains extended versions of almost all articles already described. Marc Leman describes the problem of Tone Context by Pattern Integration over Time.

Borin, DePoli and Sarti offer a contribution with Sound Synthesis by Dynamic Systems Interaction, Reichbach and Kemmerer a study titled SoundWorks: An Object-Oriented Distributed System for Digital Sound, Otto Laske an analysis of his music piece Furies and Voices: Composition-Theoretical Observations, T. Janzen describes his system AlgoRhythms: Real-Time Algorithmic Composition for a Microcomputer. The music obtained by Laske and Janzen can be obtained in form of a cassette by the authors - details in the text.

Conclusions

The projects, as well as the music produced, show a healthy blend of past and present: Chopin, Mozart, Bach, Brahms, Tchaikowsky, Debussy, Jazz and Hard Bop, Pentatonic Scales, together with contemporary pieces by Kuivila, Dannenberg, Velikonjia, Haus, Canepa, Keefe, Laske, Janzen.

In this sense, Computer Generated Music is perfectly inserted in the music tradition, which for at least the last forty centuries has never hesitated in adopting and adapting to its needs the latest technological discoveries, from bowed strings and pipes with holes to microprocessors and symbolic languages, passing through medieval carillons, fine mechanics for pianos and saxophones, and electronics of the fifties.