The recent announcement this week that Brian Eno would be designing the musical score for Will Wright’s highly-anticipated game Spore probably heralds the first (relatively) mainstream application of “generative music” since the wind chime was invented. That’s designing the score—not composing—mind you, for when all is said and done even Eno won’t have heard the bulk of his own creation. No one will, actually.

Generative music is neither as static as a recording nor as ephemeral as a live performance; rather, a single generative music composition provides the listener with a number of varied listening experiences based on a predetermined set of parameters provided by the artist. Press play once, you hear one song. Press it again, you hear another somewhat different piece. Same underlying foundations, different results every time.

I first read about this emerging form back in 1996 and was instantly taken with the concept. (This might be the article I read.) At the time, it seemed like the only form of electronic music that utilized a computer’s uniquely complex computing capability to its fullest potential, and I remember anxiously awaiting the coming generative revolution. Hasn’t quite happened yet, but with the appearance last year of Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS... are the winds of progress a-blowin’?

Bonus: Mess around with Koan X, a free, MIDI-based G.M. system. It’s limited in that you can’t actually set your own parameters for each composition, and are forced to use preset instrument “templates” instead. But it’s a nice introduction and a great waste of time at work. Unfortunately, it uses MIDI, so if you don’t have a good soundcard—i.e., most of us—it can sound pretty cheap.