Music By Natural Selection 164
maccallr writes "The DarwinTunes experiment needs you! Using an evolutionary algorithm and the ears of you the general public, we've been evolving a four bar loop that started out as pretty dismal primordial auditory soup and now after >27k ratings and 200 generations is sounding pretty good. Given that the only ingredients are sine waves, we're impressed. We got some coverage in the New Scientist CultureLab blog but now things have gone quiet and we'd really appreciate some Slashdotter idle time. We recently upped the maximum 'genome size' and we think that the music is already benefiting from the change."
Sine waves? (Score:4, Informative)
All signals can be represented with a set of sine waves. That's what makes Fourier transforms so useful.
What would be really impressive is if they had music that can't be represented as a set of sine waves.
WARNING: AntivirusXP (Score:5, Informative)
The site has paid ads, one of which apparently has been taken over by the XPAntiVirus people. If you visit the site, it will install malware, unless you are using Firefox and Linux.
Re:Sine waves (Score:4, Informative)
This is different from all other sounds, including regular music, how?
Square waves [wikipedia.org], triangle waves [wikipedia.org], sawtooth waves [wikipedia.org], and the ever popular noise (play with a SID chip someday). Sure, they're approximated by putting together sine waves, and they might even just happen to "evolve" from selected sine wave combinations, but the meaning came across just fine.
Re:Already slashdotted ? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm the site admin. Sorry for the inability to withstand slashdotting. This was supposed to only go in "Idle"...
You can get to the actual evolving music bit
via this ugly EC2 URL [amazonaws.com]
That link will not work in a few days from now (when I let go of the machine). Too stingy to pay for an elastic IP ;-)
cheers,
Bob.
Re:Sine waves (Score:5, Informative)
A square wave is a sine wave with added sine waves of odd harmonics to the fundamental.
No paid ads (Score:3, Informative)
This is an academic site and there are no paid ads. It hasn't been compromised either, as far as I can tell.
Re:Sine waves (Score:3, Informative)
Distortion guitar is essentially a square wave.
Not really.
A guitar's waveform is complex, so you won't get evenly timed transitions even with infinite overdrive and perfect clipping. Second, infinite overdrive sounds harsh so few guitarists use it (thus the continuing popularity vacuum tube amplifiers). Finally, the sound of electric guitars is also influenced by a speaker cabinet (or simulation thereof) with essentially no treble response.
I used to play with 555 timers for making noise as a kid. The sound has a brain numbing clickety quality. Here [wikimedia.org] is an example at approximately two octaves above middle C (the eighth fret on a guitar's high E string).
Re:No paid ads (Score:2, Informative)
However, the link to "some Slashdotter idle time" links to the New Scientist... and that seems to be where the compromise actually hit me.