My first exploration with Experiments in Musical Intelligence
involved coding the rules of basic part-writing as I understood
them, since part writing constitutes one of the primary
superstructures of traditional tonal music. After much trial and
error, my program produced a kind of vanilla music which
basically adhered to these rules. While basically correct in
terms of how the voices move one to another and still conform to
classical triadic harmony, the music seemed, at least to the
educated ear, lifeless and without much musical energy. While
some of the music composed using this approach did prove fairly
successful, most of its output was equally uninteresting and
unsatisfying. Having an intermediary - myself - form abstract
sets of rules for composition seemed artificial and
unnecessarily premeditative. As well, having to code new sets of
rules for each new style encountered proved daunting. I
therefore revised the program to create new output from music
stored in a database. My idea was that every work