What are the historical antecedents of WolframTones?
Ideas of “generative music” or “algorithmic composition” go back a long way. Mozart, for example, was said to have a scheme for composing minuets based on throwing dice. In the early 20th century, composers like Schoenberg considered formal matrix-like methods, and especially in connection with early synthesizers there was interest in deriving music from electronic and other physical processes. In the late 20th century, many experiments were done using 1/f noise, fractals, L systems, and even cellular automata. Most often, explicit randomness was taken as the foundation, and extensive layers of post processing were done. The publication of A New Kind of Science led to a new approach, and much purer ways to derive music from the computational universe–culminating in WolframTones.
