''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 refers 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 Violin, violini ...

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

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

.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 ...

, 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. Compute ...

computer at the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...

(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 produ ...

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 r ...

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

generative grammar Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists (), ...

s or

Markov chain In probability theory and statistics, a Markov chain or Markov process is a stochastic process describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. Informally ...

s (see stochastic music).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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* * * Compositions for string quartet Computer music compositions Suites (music) 1957 compositions {{music-stub