''Illiac Suite'' (later retitled String Quartet No. 4)Andrew Stiller, "Hiller, Lejaren (Arthur)", ''Grove Music Online'' (reviewed December 3, 2010; accessed December 14, 2014). is a 1957 composition for

string quartet The term string quartet can refer to either a type of musical composition or a group of four people who play them. Many composers from the mid-18th century onwards wrote string quartets. The associated musical ensemble consists of two violinists ...

which is generally agreed to be the first score composed by an

electronic Electronic may refer to: *Electronics, the science of how to control electric energy in semiconductor * ''Electronics'' (magazine), a defunct American trade journal *Electronic storage, the storage of data using an electronic device *Electronic co ...

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

.Denis L. Baggi,
The Role of Computer Technology in Music and Musicology
", ''lim.dico.unimi.it'' (December 9, 1998).

Lejaren Hiller Lejaren Arthur Hiller Jr. (February 23, 1924, New York City – January 26, 1994, Buffalo, New York)Lejaren Hi ...

, in collaboration with Leonard Isaacson, programmed the

ILLIAC I The ILLIAC I (Illinois Automatic Computer), a pioneering computer in the ILLIAC series of computers built in 1952 by the University of Illinois, was the first computer built and owned entirely by a United States educational institution. Computer ...

computer at the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Universit ...

(where both composers were professors) to generate compositional material for his String Quartet No. 4. The piece consists of four movements, corresponding to four experiments: the first is about the generation of '' cantus firmi'', the second generates four-

voice The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound production in ...

segments with various rules, the third deals with

rhythm Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular recu ...

, dynamics and playing instructions, and the fourth with various models and probabilities for

generative grammar Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistic ...

s or

Markov chain A Markov chain or Markov process is a stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. Informally, this may be thought of as, "What happe ...

s (see

stochastic music Stochastic (, ) refers to the property of being well described by a random probability distribution. Although stochasticity and randomness are distinct in that the former refers to a modeling approach and the latter refers to phenomena themselv ...

).Lejaren A. Hiller and Leonard M. Isaacson,
Experimental Music: Composition With an Electronic Computer
', second edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959): 5–7. Reprinted, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. .

References

External links

* December 4, 2011. See also
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* * * {{Computer music Compositions for string quartet Computer music compositions Suites (music)