Some history for you guys: first computer composition
Hey guys,
I’m a Computer Science major at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and it turns out that my university has a “Experimental Music Studio” where they experiment with music assisted composition and sound synthesis.
So here’s some history for you (I have school spirit, what can I say? 
)
Select stuff from wikipedia:
"Lejaren Arthur Hiller (February 23, 1924, New York City – January 26, 1994, Buffalo, New York) was an American composer who founded the Experimental Music Studio at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1958 and collaborated on the first significant computer music composition, 1957’s Illiac Suite, with Leonard Issacson. This was his fourth string quartet.
He wrote an article on the Illiac Suite for Scientific American, which led a lot of attention from the press, and a storm of controversy. The musical establishment was so hostile to this interloper scientist that both Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians refused to include him until shortly before his death."
“Hiller commented: “I observed that if we could program a computer to simulate a ‘walk’ through, say, ordinary space, we could also simulate a ‘walk’ through a grid defined to represent musical elements such as pitch, rhythmic durations, and timbre choices …””
Article the department wrote about him:
http://ems.music.uiuc.edu/history/hiller.html
The man at work:
MP3 of his “ILLIAC Suite”:
http://www.maa.org/editorial/mathgames/IlliacSuite7.mp3
