A modular package of notes and instructions written by the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the Musical Dice Game was published in 1793, which, through combinatorics, made it possible to “compose” an extremely high number of ever new waltzes. For each of the sixteen measures of the dance piece to be made, eleven alternatives were provided, one of which is selected using random methods (e.g. dice). This results in around 46 x 1015 individual pieces.

So far, a number of computer programmers have made real-time realizations of this piece. What is new about this project is that a statistical Markov-analysis (named after its inventor) is applied to Mozart’s musical material. This method checks the number of times each note of a musical example occurs individually, or in pairs, or in groups of three etc. (which is called the order of analysis, here 0, 1, 2) – based on this analysis, a resynthesis differs from the original with variable clarity. If one applies the Markov method to a text in English, for example, the resynthesis of order zero, in which letters are singly counted, remains incomprehensible - only the frequency of occurrence of the individual letters is correct. Order one, on the other hand, creates a text that appears Germanic – it could be a form of English, German or even Icelandic; at order two one sees individual recognizable syllables reappear... Orders higher than four reproduce many parts of the original text verbatim.

Our investigations have shown that the application of Markov’s method to Mozart’s Dice Game shows, as expected, different levels of “note-fidelity” - with order four it is difficult to distinguish the result from the original, with order two the music sounds quite interesting: it differs from the original significantly, but remains relatively stylistically faithful. Order zero is only able to produce clumsy but comical imitations of Mozart’s music.

This Markov-treated Mozart work has been realized as a computer program called Würfelgang (“Würfel” means “dice” and “Gang” means “run” or “course”) and can be heard here via a computer-controlled player piano; a second instrument of this type is used to create rhythmically synchronized sequences of notes triggered by Würfelgang and composed by my computer program Autobusk. The resulting interaction called Amaludus (“love of games” and a reference to Amadeus) runs uninterruptedly throughout the duration of the three-day-festival on the two pianos, placed in a special room as far apart as possible from each other. Lasting about three-quarters of a minute each, over 5000 different waltzes and their associated Autobusk run-throughs are played during this time. During opening hours, spectators can enter and leave the room at any time; the constantly varying number of people present, measured by scanning electronics, automatically alters the Markov level.