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Iannis Xenakis is of course the first who comes to mind, since he had a Ph.D. in mathematics and engineering, and wrote what is known as stochastic music. What is probably his most famous piece, Metastasis, is based upon measurements and shapes from a particular building. He also more or less initiated the field of music made with granular synthesis, which suits itself very well to stochastic and other algorithmic composition methods. There's a pretty good writeup here.

Then there's Conlon Nancarrow, who, while not having any formal mathematical training (so far as I know), spent most of his career hand-punching player piano rolls in very complex rhythmical relationships. (He later said that if he had access to computers, he of course would have done it that way -- hand-punching is a pain in the ass!). Read about him here.

Charles Dodge hung out at Bell Labs for a while, and wrote a piece called "Earth's Magnetic Field", based on measurements of the Earth's magnetic field. He also produced some of the first successful pieces using voice synthesis (which are available on an album called "Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental"; really good listening!), and is in general a smart engineering guy who writes good computer music. Official page here (not very interesting), and a bit written by him here.

You may also have heard of serialism, which was, if not algorithmic, at least systematic. There were even composers in the classical period using what can really only be called algorithms.

So, anyways, while I agree that the Wolfram music is silly, that doesn't mean you can't make excellent music using formal systems, algorithms, or even representations of some data set.

Yes that's correct. First "COMPOSERS" of e-music were french (music concrete) and german. Pierre Schaeffer cut'n and splicing; and Karlheinz Stockhausen twidling and tweak'n.

I just want to point out that Varese, working at Philips labs (of the consumer electronics), has also been experimenting with electronic music, publishing their first results in 1917, far ahead of the tape recording in this article.

You can read more here

The manipulation of recorded sounds electronically was originally known a musique concrete and was made possible by the invention of the tape recorder (though there was undoubtedly some misunderstood guy getting excited at the idea of chopping up wax cylinders before 1900). Some of this music from the 50s is truly amazing and would have required an incredible amount of tape splicing.

Presumably sound editing was possible with film in the 30s, though it would have been out of reach all but the richest avant garde composers. John Cage, who worked with the Barrons wondered what kind of sound pictures of Beethoven's head would make if placed on an optical film sound track. Probably an annoying buzz- but Cage was avant garde music's ideas man...

Roughly conteporary with the Dada movement were the Futurists.

Luigi Rossollo was a(the?) Futrist composer. He costructed his own instruments, of which most were mechanical, but some were electric.

He also wrote a musical manifesto, which according to some, was quite infuential on later eletronic msicians. It was called "The art of noise".
Sound familliar? ;-)
More here: http://csunix1.lvc.edu/~snyder/em/russolo.html

This guys is 100% correct.. I can't for the life of me remember what the thing was called though.. but it was a huge machine that they carted around using the railroads.. I had to watch a boring documentary about this device when I was in college.. a far more interesting pioneer of electronic music was pierre schaeffer.. he invented all the techniques that electronic musicians use today.. sampling, loops, reverse, time shifting, etc.. all using records.. called if musique concrete.. recording sounds and making music out of them.. sampling.. he was a genius.. the barrons were cool and all.. http://csunix1.lvc.edu/~snyder/em/schaef.html

Can't find much information skimming through that link. Are you sure you don't mean the futurists? Luigi Russolo for example.

If that's all it takes to be called music, then I'm going to record all the noises my car makes and sell a CD of it.

Actually, there is an entire genre of modern-classical music, Pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer where the music is made primarily, or exclusively from found sound. It celebrated it's 50th anniversary a couple years ago or something.

A show on a local radio show does Musique Concrete once a month. One of my favorite shows was musick made entirely from train sounds. It's funny that I thought of that from a slashdot article posted earlier today.

Usually the sounds are manipulated in one way or another.

The music that this article talks about is not Musique Concrete, but it is experimental music that would probably be appreciated by the same people.

I take it that this pertains mainly to pop music, but one might also want to look into these fellas. I once heard some electronic music composed during the early '60s (iirc) that was obviously the source of Stereolab's sound. I regret that I can't remember who composed it. So, check out the info below on Milton Babbitt and Edgard Varese.

http://directory.google.com/Top/Arts/Music/Composi tion/Composers/B/Babbitt,_Milton/?tc=1

http://csunix1.lvc.edu/~snyder/em/varese.html