Musical Dice Games

The idea of the musical dice game is to cut and paste prewritten measures of music randomly together to create a piece of music. The random generation is done by a dice roll. The sum of the thrown numbers is looked up in a scoring table to determine which measure to play.

Today, its W.A. Mozarts (1756-1791) "Musikalisches Würfelspiel" which became famous and succesful. This mucical dice game was first published in 1793 two years after the death of Mozart. The original manuscript nor a direct reference to Mozart were ever found, but his authorship is no longer questionned by musicologists (Köchelverzeichnis KV1 Anh. 294d, KV6-516F).

I first heard about Mozart's dice composer in 1991. The july issue of the Computer magazine Vol.24 No.7 published by the IEEE Computer society was dedicated to computer-generated music. The project overview of Stephen W. Smoliar "Algorithms for musical composition: a question of granularity; pp.54-56" mentionned Mozart's work.

The same year (1991), Chris G. Earnshaw from Cambridge, developped a computer implementation of Mozart's dice game as a public domain program for the Atari computers. His version was based on the 1798 edition by Simrock in Bonn (reprinted by the Liverpool Music Press) of Mozart's "Instructions to compose without the least knowledge of music so much german waltzer or schleifer as one pleases, by throwing a certain number with two dice" . Other programmers have written before him versions for the BBC micro and for the Sinclair Computer.

In the mean time, many computer implementations of Mozart's Würfelspiel have been published on the web. The most interesting related www sites are shown below.

• John Chuang: Mozart's Musikalisches Würfelspiel
  http://sunsite.univie.ac.at/Mozart/dice/
  This site is a very clever MIDI implementation of the game and allows you to compose your own Mozart minuet.
• Zsó Ruttkay and Bram Boskamp: Composing Mozart variations with dice
  http://www.cwi.nl/~zsofi/mozart
  A very nice implementation of Mozart's game; the site is dedicated to mathematical challenges and educational experiences related to musical dice games.
• Nate C. Burgess: A genetic algorithmic variation of Mozart's Dice Game.
  http://www.excelsus.com/~cloudman/igm/paper/toc.html
  Interactive genetic music composition; B.S.degree in computer science 1997
  

Mozart was not the first composer who was interested in chance music and mathematical composition. Other known authors are A. Kircher (1650), Mizler (1793), J. Haydn (1793), F.G. Hayn (1798), J.C. Graf (1801), C.H. Fiedler (1801), L. Fischer (1801), A. Calegaris (1801) and G. Catrufo (1811). The best documented historical work is Johann Philipp Kirnberger 's "Der allezeit fertige Polonoisen= und Menuettencomponist" published in 1757.

The following sites are dedicated to J.P. Kirnbergers musical dice game.

• Hubert Kupper: Polonoisen- und Menuettenkomponist von J.P. Kirnberger
  http://www.musikwissenschaft.uni-mainz.de/Musikinformatik/Berichte/Nr_15/Kirnframe.html
  Das Original Manuskript Kirnbergers wird in der Musikabteilung der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek aufbewahrt.
  Eine Mikrofilmkopie liegt im Musikwissenschaftlichen Institut der Albertus-Magnus-Universität zu Köln.
  Eine Abbildung davon ist auf den www-Seiten verfügbar, ebenso eine interaktive MIDI-Applikation mit Java-Applet. Ein umfassendes Literaturverzeichnis und eine detaillierte Beschreibung runden den Bericht ab.
  Die Seitenaufteilung erfolgt mit Frames (4 Bildschirmfenster).
  
• Werner Icking: A MusiXTeX package
  http://www.gmd.de/Misc/Music/scores/kirnberger
  The package contains all files necessary to generate a new dice-menuet and to process it with MusiXTeX. The MusiXTeX compiler is available on a lot of FTP-servers.