When Peter Russell first heard the unusual music, he was pleasantly surprised. It was a “delightful piece of chamber music”, he wrote, reminiscent of French pieces written in the early 20th Century. “After repeated hearings, I came to like it.”

What Russell, a musicologist, didn’t know was that the score titled Hello World had actually been composed much more recently by a computer called Iamus. Other listeners in blind tests have been similarly fooled. (Why not listen to it yourself as you read this article?)

Iamus is the creation of computer scientist Francisco Vico and his collaborators at the University of Malaga in Spain. It also has a younger sibling, called Melomics109, which composes ‘popular’ music.

You might think that any serious composers would turn up their noses at music made by a computer algorithm. But a few are already taking Iamus’s ideas very seriously. In 2012, a CD showcasing Iamus’s compositions featured performances by some of the world’s top musicians, including the London Symphony Orchestra. One of the other musicians to appear on the recording was Gustavo Diaz-Jerez, a composer and concert pianist at the Centro Superior de Música del País Vasco, in Spain, who is even using Iamus to write an opera that premieres next year.

No previous attempts to make music by computer – and there have been many, dating back to the early days of computation – have been afforded such serious attention.