Today I came across a curious thing, Mozart’s Dice Game.
According to wikipedia, a Musical Dice Game is a game to roll dices and create random music. (I found this game reading how a neural network was trained to generate Bach’s music).

There are several Musical Dice Games created by different compositeurs, but the most famous of all is, of course, Mozart’s one.

Mozart musical dice game was published one year after his dead by his publisher. This generates some doubts about game’s creator.

“The idea was to compose a 16-measure “waltz” by rolling dice to decide which measures to select from a large pool of choices.

In the “Musikalisches Würfelspiel,” the measures are numbered from 1 to 176, and the numbers are arranged in two charts, each consisting of 11 rows and eight columns. To select the first measure, a player would roll two dice, subtract 1 from the total, and look up the corresponding row in the first column of the first chart to determine the appropriate measure number. Subsequent rolls of the dice decide which measure to select from each successive column to complete the melody.”

Here we can see an example.

In Mozart’s version you can generate 45,949,729,863,572,161 different waltzs, so each time you generate one it will be played for first time.

Looking on google i found this page where you can download a zip with the exe file to play Mozart’s Musical Dice Game.

Please, take a while to play the game, you will enjoy it. :)

This is what I have made.

Now want to read: Gardner, M. 2001. Melody-making machines. In The Colossal Book of Mathematics. New York: Norton.

References:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel
Ivars Peterson’s Math Trek: http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_8_21_01.html
Mozart Dice Game: http://www.amaranthpublishing.com/MozartDiceGame.htm
Jim Jubak, “La máquina pensante”, Ediciones B, (1993).