For some computer lovers, the sounds that computers make is music to their ears. And by “sound,” I don’t mean 32-bit digitized audio coming from a Sound Blaster Audigy; I mean the actual mechanical whirrs, clanks, and cronks that emanate from computing hardware in action. They make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

It was this very love I had in mind when I set out to compose a “computer music” piece for a class I took at a local university back in Spring 2002. But I wasn’t exactly following the instructions (more on that later). The class focused on the history and composition of music generated by computers. Not pop music or anything like it, of course, but what I would typically call “highly inaccessible, elitist, please pull the stick from my ass” music. In particular, we learned about what proponents of the genre call “new music,” which pretty much means any music that has an unconventional structure, typically lacking vocals, instruments, rhythm or melody as we know them. The computer variety of this avant garde style arose from early attempts at generating music with computers in the 1950s and 60s, but lacking sufficient computational horsepower for a decent compositional AI at the time (and even now), composers could only squeeze abstruse sequences of notes from their machines. But (surprise!) some people thought it was cool because it was abstruse, and a new class of music elitists was born. They embraced the limitations of the medium and ran with them — straight into a wall. If you think you’d get a kick from the seemingly random bloops and bleeps generated from applying a complex algorithm to the DNA of sperm whales, then this music is definitely for you. Sure, it’s got a great “nerd factor,” but it’s hardly emotionally inspiring.

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