Wk 3 Forum looking at other students wonderful creations

Today in forum, we first years got to experience some of the work that the second and third years have done in their time at Adelaide. By the end of the lecture I found myself wondering about composition, their compositions and the value of a composition…and the composer…. Take John for example… I can only really describe his software as a composition generator. He has programmed software to trigger random samples (the random samples mostly consisted of sample tank strings) and made a whole bunch of recordings. Stating that he programmed this software because he likes large tone clusters, I can only assume that his favourite recording out of 20 featured a lot of these along with the standard build and decay present in most music. Two students on and another piece of software that does similar things…in this instance it was Dave with his ‘self contained sampling unit with on board effects processing unit’. With the samples that Dave loaded in, I can see no value in this thing at all. Potentially, with different samples, the resulting ‘music’ might be more, uh, musical, at any rate, the end result is a product of chance and whimsy. So, what value can a piece composed in this manner could possibly have? If the end result hasn’t been premeditated in some way, if you just land on it by chance, can it still claim legitimacy as a composition and value as a piece of music?