Abstract
This article gives an account of a research project conducted during 1995-1997 studying the GENDYN program and music. The GENDYN program is the software implementation of dynamic stochastic synthesis, a rigorous algorithmic composition procedure conceived by Iannis Xenakis (1992). The original program was written in BASIC by the composer himself at CEMAMu, Paris, with the assistance of Marie-H61n it does not depend on any other information input than that coded into the program lines. (Xenakis did parameterize some variables in his algorithm, but he did so by hard-coding their values into an auxiliary program called PARAG, read by GENDYN on startup. So, to be precise, the statement is true for the two programs GENDYN and PARAG taken together as a whole.) From an artistic point of view, however, the question is how far Xenakis, working with the program, was actually able to realize his artistic intents in his composition in spite of its sound and structure being entirely generated by probabilities. Trying to understand this, I decided to study the architecture of his program and also to operate it myself in order to practically experience the material conditions of Xenakis's creative work with the
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