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."
Not particularly original (Score:1, Interesting)
"Paragraph 7" by Cornelius Cardew, among other works, explored similar ground decades earlier. (Citation to my friend's book on Brian Eno's Another Green World.)
If You're Looking for an Introduction to This (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sine waves? (Score:3, Interesting)
How about an infinite piece of non-repeating music, consisting of say, a beep at every prime second and silence otherwise?
copyright? (Score:5, Interesting)
What keeps people from herding it toward an existing copyrighted tune? Even composers accidentally do this all the time.
Re:Sine waves? (Score:4, Interesting)
This isn't remotely my area of expertise, but I believe that would be representable with an infinitely large set of sine waves.
A simpler "gotcha" is a perfectly square pulse. For example, 1 HZ for 1 second, complete silence before and after that second. I believe that requires an infinite number of sine waves to model as well.
grammidity (Score:4, Interesting)
I've written a few genetic algorithm/programming things for "music" over the years. However, not being a musician, I approached it only from an algorithmic perspective. The last of these, called "grammidity" can attempt to evolve sequences of midi events based on a kind of grammar that evolves (loosely based on the ideas behind L-systems). I had it online for a couple of years, but it never evolved much of anything interesting. The source code (java) is on sourceforge [sourceforge.net] and includes ways to evolve "plants" and a fuzzer that generates html and which worked quite nicely to break browsers a couple of years back.