LO 6: Randomness

For this Week’s LO, I will talk about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s (attributed but up for debate) Musical Dice Game (1792) – also known as Musikalisches Wurfelspiel.

Seeing how we were to find Randomness, I was initially at a loss. Until I happened onto this piece that was allegedly from Mozart himself.

Its randomness lies in the fact that a die (or two) is supposed to be thrown to get a value from 2 to 12 but minus 1 – so a range of 1-11. With this number, a person will consult a chart that has 8 columns and 11 rows. The “random” number will give the person the measure of music from the row of the column and then they will move onto the next column and repeat the process. They will do this for all 8 columns and the second set of 8 columns and 11 rows each in the second chart. The end product is a 16-Measure Piece of Music.

This is where the computation comes in – it is just like the nested for loops we have been working with. Furthermore, the available measures are like the arrays.

Overall, I like Classical Music and Mozart is one of my favorites. And I find it cool that he supposedly made something like this.

Here is Mozart’s Bio and Musical Dice Games (there is a section for Mozart’s in it).