I was looking about for prodecural level/music/etc design and came across footage of the
LongNow conference with Brian Eno and Will Wright.

The discussion reminded me of an old Amiga program called Algomusic (and also the random music that was in Poing {another Amiga program}).

As I couldn't find any algorithmic music generators that I liked, I thought I'd have a go at writing my own.

* Mk V.56: http://www.marasmusine.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/DuncsAlgomusicV56.zip
* Mk IIIb: http://www.marasmusine.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/DuncsAlgomusicIIIb.zip
* Mk III: http://www.marasmusine.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/DuncsAlgomusicIII.zip
Requirements: Some form of machine running some form of Windows, probably. Some speakers.

Mk V (2.9 Mb) - Completely different version with a different approach; is not intended to supercede MkIIIb

Mk IIIb (690kb) fixes two undocumented features (and is 2kb smaller, somehow):

• No longer mutates a drum channel to use an instrument sound (Occasionally produced interesting results, but was mostly annoying)
• Snares were usually off beat; they are now usually timed better (with an occasional fill-in)

Songs used in popular culture:

• "Doctor Ashen" (MkIIIb) - used by popular YouTube comedian and reviewer at the start of all his videos

MkIII (692kb)adds some drumbeats, minor volume effects, channels that echo other channels, user can name a track (names set the random seed, so the same title will generate the same song)
Two days work. This version has a few more sounds, chord variety, random titles.
This is one day's work, so it's not amazing, but still quite fun.

"Oh. Seems a bit useless" - Empty Space, Birdbath Social - http://s13.zetaboards.com/Birdbath/topic/354436/1/
Note: typing in "Oh. Seems a bit useless" (minus the quotes) in MkIIIb produces no sound at all! (however this is not true for later versions)

"You know, if someone decided to make a movie about BitTorrent, this would make a perfect soundtrack." - Supermikhail, bay12games forum - http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=48880.0

>>Hmm. Harmony of Holocentric time is quite nice. I did enjoy Angry Baby as well. I think the first track I got was Cybernetic Diffusion which also was quite nice.

>I should point out that the titles are case sensitive. Those last two were quite good. I'm quite fond of "Good Music" (ironically.) Wow, the rain is really coming down heavily. I've opened a window because I like the sound it makes.

>>Ooh Concepts of Mathematics is ace.
Yeah, a rare case of the "loading a instrument sound for a snare" bug producing a nice result.

>>Parts of Technology and Arcane Music are my favourites... the latter is hilarious. There is another brilliant free algorithmic program called cgMusic.
Hey, thanks for suggesting cgMusic, I didn't know about it and it sounds quite fun, more or less what I was trying to achieve with this. For those interested, I downloaded it from http://codeminion.com/blogs/maciek/2008/05/cgmusic-computers-create-music/

Alex: I'm trying to build a parametric midi computer for generating complex and intelligent music very easily.
I've also got notes somewhere about a method of gathering feedback from a listener so that the style(s) of music required at any one time could be easily selected, and even predicted by making comparisons against other environmental data, eg time of day, time of year, the weather, astrological data etc...
I'll try to load some of those notes up here sometime, see what sense you can make of them, and if you could share your sauce code (privately or publicly) then I'll see what entertaining modifications I can make =)

As long as this "intelligent music" stuff won't take over my computer and start answering my emails.
>>you can get some amazing results with cgMusic, try: Modern Song Structure - 11055 / Simple Ballad Song Arrangement - 26055 (you can probably already see that on that page, but I got the second seed wrong). Not the best I had, but the only one I noted the seeds down. I like your approach better, though, that is to have instant music creation and word seeding.