> Music composers have long been attracted by the idea of an automated tool for music generation, that is able to aid them in their day-to-day compositional process.

As an amateur composer I find this notion ridiculous. I love my DAW and all of its capabilities, but the compositional process itself is something I’ll never want to automate. That would defeat the purpose. I’d give long odds that if many composers were surveyed the percentage who want software to generate musical ideas for them would be close to zero.

Perhaps an argument can be made for things like instrumentation and arrangement, which was often outsourced to students even by the great composers. Writing out the score for a full symphony orchestra is very tedious, and quite repetitive within the conventions of the late 1800s.

But that’s about all I can think of. Just the availability of copy-paste appreciates 90% of that, I would imagine.

I'd argue that if you've never longed for automations, it's because you've never written a hard score. Any ambitious piece written at the churn pace that a composer needs to make a living - any such piece uses algorithmic tricks under the hood. There's human decision and judgment in using those, but it doesn't diminish their value - much less having them as automations.

this is provably false. the demand for generative compositional techniques fuels a lot of the Eurorack market. people pay lots of money for machines that generate musical ideas. and the history of algorithmic composition goes back to at least the 12th century. it’s niche, undeniably, but it’s not zero.