In 1955, Lejaren A. Hiller, Jr., and L. M. Isaacson began to program the ILLIAC computer at the University of Illinois to compose music. The computer actually published its work, including “Illiac Suite for String Quartet,” Copyright 1957, New Music Editions, done in the style of Palestrina. All music lies somewhere between the complete randomness of, say, the hissing of electrons in vacuum tubes and the orderliness of a sustained tone. No less a master than Stravinsky has called composition “the great technique of selection,” and the computer can be taught to select in about any degree we desire. Hiller describes the process, in which the machine is given fourteen notes representing two octaves of the C-major scale, and restricted to “first-species counterpoint.” By means of this screening technique, the computer “composed” by a trial-and-error procedure that may be analogous to that of the human musician. Each note was examined against the criteria assigned; if it passed, it was stored in memory; if not, another was tried. If after fifty trials no right note was found, the “composition” was abandoned, much as might be done by a human composer who has written himself into a corner, and a new start was made. In an hour of such work, ILLIAC produced several hundred short melodies—a gold mine for a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith! It was then told to produce two-voice counterpoint for the basic melodies. “Illiac Suite” is compared, by its programmers at least, with the modern music of Bartok.
Purists whose sensibilities are offended by the very notion of computer music point out that music is subjective—a means of conveying emotion from the heart of the composer to that of the listener. Be that as it may, the composition itself is objective and can be rigorously analyzed mathematically, before or after the fact. From a technical standpoint there seems to be only one question about this new music—who composed it, the programmer or the computer?
An interesting sidelight to computer music is its use to test the acoustics of as yet unbuilt auditoriums. Bell Telephone Laboratories has devised such a machine in its Acoustical and Visual Research Department. The specifications of the new auditorium are fed into the computer, followed by music recorded on tape. The computer’s output is then this music as it will sound in the new hall. Critical experts listen and decide if the auditorium acoustics are all right, or if some redesign is in order.
The Machine at Play
The computer’s game-playing ability in chess and other games has been described. It is getting into the act in other fields, spectator sports as well. Baseball calls on the computer to plan season strategy and predict winners. When Roger Maris began his home-run string, an IBM 1401 predicted that he had 55 chances in 100 of beating Ruth’s record. Workers at M.I.T. have developed a computer program that answers questions like “Did the Red Sox ever win six games in a row?” and “Did every American League team play at least once in each park in every month?”
An IBM RAMAC computer is handling the management of New York’s Aqueduct race track, and promises to do a better job than the human bosses, thus saving money for the owners and the State of New York Tax Commission. The Fifteenth Annual Powderpuff Derby, the all-women transcontinental air race, was scored by a Royal Precision LGP-30 computer, and sports car enthusiasts have built their own “rally” computers to gauge their progress. The Winter Olympics at Innsbruck, Austria, will be scored by IBM’s RAMAC, and even bowling gets an assist from the computer in the form of a scoring device added to the automatic pin-setter, bad news to scorekeepers who fudge to boost their points.
An IBM 704 has proved a handy tool for blackjack players with a system for winning 99 per cent of the time, and rumor has it that a Los Angeles manufacturer plans to market a computer weighing only two pounds and costing $5, for horse-players.
Showing that the computer can be programmed with tact is the demonstrator that answers a man’s age correctly if he answers ten questions but announces only that a woman is over twenty-one. Proof that the computer has invaded just about every occupation there is comes to light in the news that a Frankfurt travel agency uses a computer called Zuse L23 as an agent. The traveler simply fills out a six-question form, and in a few seconds Zuse picks the ideal vacation from a choice of 500. Computers, it seems, are already telling us where to go.
Business Outlook
The computer revolution promises to reach clear to the top of the business structure, rather than find its level somewhere in middle management. The book, Management Games lists more than 30,000 business executives who have taken part in electronic computer management “games” in some hundred different versions. The first widely used such game was developed in 1956 by the American Management Association. While such games are for educational purposes, their logical extension is the actual conduct of business by a programmed computer.