Electric Light Orchestra’s 1981 classic ‘Yours Truly 2095’ was a love song for a computer—but what about love songs by computers? Will a computer ever publish music on iTunes?

That day may come sooner than you think. Today, we’ve collected four songs composed by computers over the years, and the truth is clear: they’ve come a long way, and they’re only getting smarter.

1956 –Illiac Suite for String Quartet

This was the first piece of music ever composed by a computer. Go ahead, give it a listen—the thing was a total mess. Today, it’s notable only for being the first of many. No one who wanted to sell records or even publish music on iTunes would create a track like this.

1990s –From Darkness, Light

David Cope, a music professor at UC Santa Cruz, created a program called Emily Howell that composes its own music. It can react, in a limited way, to user feedback, and is remarkably prolific. Nonetheless, the program’s compositions are very simplistic and bland.

2013 –Adsum

This is where things get eerie. For the first time last year, a major orchestra (the London Symphony orchestra, no less!) found a piece composed entirely independently by a computer moving enough to play it. Watching the orchestra play this piece, while knowing that it was created by an unfeeling machine, is creepy in the extreme. And, on another level, impressive.

2013 –Roboterstück

Ultimately, after robots come to dominate the earth, they may compose pieces of music to please one another, rather than human listeners. This piece offers a taste of what such pieces might sound like: it’s entirely improvised by the robot playing it, based on a complicated series of algorithms, but the result sounds like nothing human.

Clearly, computers have quite a bit of catching up to do, when it comes to creating music. They may get there someday, but it’s a long way off. However, that said, if a computer wanted to publish music on iTunes—that’s a different story. SongCast makes music distribution so easy, even a robot could do it.