Computer Program 'Evolves' Music From Noise - http://news.sciencemag.org/science...
Jun 19, 2012
from
Ken Morley,
Kevin Johnson,
Maitani,
Gökhan Birlik,
eliokir,
jolie,
Todd Hoff,
Big Joe Silenced,
Aryo,
Adriano,
Sepi ⌘ سپی,
and
Eivind
liked this
"In a new study, a computer program shows how listeners drive music to evolve in a certain way. Although the resulting strains are hardly Don Giovanni, the finding shows how users' tastes exert their own kind of natural selection, nudging tunes to evolve out of noise. (...) Bioinformaticist Robert MacCallum of Imperial College London was working with a program called DarwinTunes, which he and his colleagues had developed to study the musical equivalent of evolution in the natural world. The program produces 8-second sequences of randomly generated sounds, or loops, from a database of digital "genes." In a process akin to sexual reproduction, the loops swap bits of code to create offspring. "Genetic" mutations crop up as new material is inserted at random. The "daughter" loops retain some of the pitch, tone quality, and rhythm of their parents, but with their own unique material added. (...)"
- Amira
"In a musical take on survival of the fittest, the highest-scored loops went on to pair up with others and replicate. Each resulting generation was rated again for its appeal. After about 2500 generations of sound loops, what started out as a cacophony of noise had evolved into pleasant strains of music. (...) Computerized reproduction has its limits. For example, the music did not become more beautiful indefinitely, but hit a plateau at which it stayed at the same, innocuous level."
- Amira
See also: Music-Brain Network http://www.musicbrainnetwork.com/ -- really ingenious!
- Amira
"Applying the Price equation, a general description of evolutionary processes, we found that this stasis was mostly attributable to a decrease in the fidelity of transmission. Our experiment shows how cultural dynamics can be explained in terms of competing evolutionary forces." PNAS paper: https://docs.google.com/viewer...
- Adriano
One can start breeding composers... or even refine an existing one, take for example, Drumming by Steve Reich :-) http://youtu.be/Lp-kKPtKRy8 as generation 1.
- Adriano
so cool, thanks :-)
- Amira