Musikalisches Würfelspiel

Mathematical art doesn’t all have to be visual. In 1787, Wulfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote a piece of music called Musikalisches Würfelspiel, which translates to the Musical Dice Game. Basically, what Mozart did was to make music, and allow people to randomize the music to create completely new minuets.

If you had read Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently series, I believe one of the books mentioned a random music generator too. The concept of random pieces of music is interesting, as it does pose some challenges in form of probabilities.

In modern days with the advent of pseudorandom number generators and the like, people have recreated the Musikalisches Würfelspiel. Today, I show you two sites that does such things.

• Mozart’s Musikalisches Würfelspiel is a popular site (and the most gone-to) site Musikalisches Würfelspiel.
• Another site is not as popular, but has more options: Compose your own ‘Musikalisches Würfelspiel’. This is a brainchild of several university students, and you can read about their project here.