In most cases, composers tended to create their own “raw material” to be manipulated by an algorithm (usually numbers that could then be converted to pitches, rhythms, even instrumentation or articulation, etc.). However, in the decades since, there have been plenty of algorithmic manipulations of pre-existing materials. Perhaps the most well-known in this regard is the composer David Cope, whose program “Emmy” took an input of a set of works by a certain composer (Chopin mazurkas, Bach fugues, etc.) and then would “compose” new works in that style, which often sound a bit like jumbled rearrangements of those old works. Some of the better “compositions” (as judged by Cope) were selected and ultimately received some good performances in live and recorded form. In such cases, the attribution of compositional “intent” to the machine is often much stronger than the description of Dorsen’s piece, and the resulting works (while rarely sounding like true new works) at least sounded like “music” roughly in the given style.