Try Dice music

[Extract]
The idea of the musical dice game is to cut and paste prewritten measures of music randomly together to create a piece of music. The random generation is done by a dice roll. The sum of the thrown numbers is looked up in a scoring table to determine which measure to play.

Today, it's W.A. Mozart's (1756-1791) "Musikalisches Würfelspiel" which became famous and succesful. This musical dice game was first published in 1793 two years after the death of Mozart. The original manuscript nor a direct reference to Mozart were ever found, but his authorship is no longer questioned by musicologists (Köchelverzeichnis KV1 Anh. 294d, KV6-516F).

[...]

Mozart was not the first composer who was interested in chance music and mathematical composition. Other known authors are A. Kircher (1650), Mizler (1793), J. Haydn (1793), F.G. Hayn (1798), J.C. Graf (1801), C.H. Fiedler (1801), L. Fischer (1801), A. Calegaris (1801) and G. Catrufo (1811). The best documented historical work is Johann Philipp Kirnberger 's "Der allezeit fertige Polonoisen= und Menuettencomponist" published in 1757.

from
http://webplaza.pt.lu/public/mbarnig/pages/dicemus.html


Incidentally, the whole trick to creating good quality listenable music by this method is to start with a table of 'good' musical phrases that are each able to be linked seamlessly to each other at both 'ends' and each able to function as a 'start' and 'end' phrase - a not insignificant musical task requiring considerable musical talent and theory in itself... :-)

BTW - Anybody remember those "New Age" computer or synthesiser generated 'emotional background music' CDs? Think yourself lucky if you don't - they used to drive me nearly insane as they never 'resolved' - just endlessly rambled around pathetically meaninglessly...