Musikalisches Würfelspiel

You don’t have to know how to program to make things with procedural generation. 

Want to participate in ProcJam, but don’t know how to program? Here’s an example of procedurally generated music from over a hundred years before the first computer. A Musikalisches Würfelspiel is a musical dice game, letting the player assemble a piece of music (frequently a minuet) by rolling dice and using the result to pick the next section of music.

The piece in the video above is generated by Johann Philipp Kirnberger’s Der allezeit fertige Menuetten- und Polonaisencomponist (German for “The Ever-Ready Minuet and Polonaise Composer”). There were many other generators created by different musicians, including two allegedly composed by Mozart. 

There have been a few online implementations of Mozart’s version, but most of them are apparently out of commission (including one from 1995, which I can’t get to output midi files at all). If someone’s looking for a programming project, implementing Kirnberger’s, C. P. E. Bach’s, or  Maximilian Stadler’s music generators is a worthy goal.

These generators are demonstrations of how it is often just as useful to have a good aesthetic sense of the thing you are generating. Creating a music generator can be more dependant on your knowledge of music, rather than just your skill in programming.

But what if you can’t program at all? Well, these musical games show one way to make a procedural generator that doesn’t need programming. Just a bunch of source material and some rules for randomly combining the parts. Maybe your good eye for drawing or painting, or your ear for music, or your interest in something else can suggest some way for you to invent a system for generating new things.

(video via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SQYWsfL_Fo)