DarwinTunes Iterates, Mixes And Culls To Create Listenable Music From Noise

Shipud writes "A collaboration between a group in Imperial College and Media Interaction group in Japan yielded a really cool website: darwintunes.org. The idea is to apply Darwinian-like selection to music. Starting form a garble, after several generations producing something that is actually melodic and listen-able. The selective force being the appeal of the tune to the listener. From the paper published [Monday] (abstract) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 'At any given time, a DarwinTunes population has 100 loops, each of which is 8 s long. Consumers ratethem on a five-point scale ("I can't stand it" to "I love it") as they are streamed in random order. When 20 loops have been rated,truncation selection is applied whereby the best 10 loops are paired, recombine, and have two daughters each.' Note that in 2009 the creators of darwintunes harnessed the power of Slashdot to help 'evolve' their site."

Re:

[davidwr]

first post

Ah, so this is what "Starting form a garble" means.

Appropriate, don't'cha think?

[davidwr]

Ah, the "noise" of data transmission at 14.4kbps. Memories.

110 bps is easier for the human ear to understand though.

Re:Seriously...

[jgtg32a]

No you're not. However, I have found that /. has better conversations than other sites.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't visit reddit, problem solved.

now just ...

[mister2au]

Stick a drum beat over that and we have a Eurovision 2013 winner !

Re:

[mestar]

Oh boy they would get so many more participants if the site actually worked.

It just wants to open some .pls file. WTF is a .pls file.

Re:

[cheater512]

Playlist file. Its text based so you can open it in notepad.
Tells a media player where to connect to for the stream. Throw it at VLC or a decent media player.

old news

[leaen]

We go applying genetic programing to music as homework assignment at GP class

Re:

[maccallr]

Well yes, it's easy to knock out some evo-music toy and move on. We were less interested in the toy and more interested in what happens when you let music evolve in an environment of as many human listeners as we can muster.

Re:

[pipatron]

Huh, wtf? Where? When?

Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Going to grab this software, have it run 24/7 on a Beowulf cluster of servers filled with GPUs. Eventually I will own the copyright in EVERY piece of music not yet in existence!

Re:

[Psyborgue]

Parent is modded funny but it might actually be feasible to have a random tune generator churn out every possible combination of some length of music. You probably wouldn't be able to listen to all of it in your lifetime, but you might very well be able to copyright your "tunes", create a searchable database, and run all newly released music against it. If somebody actually did this it would be interesting to see the resulting court cases. Could by doing this somebody actually DOS the copyright system?

Re:

[oldmac31310]

Yes, maybe this is something Monsanto might want to look into. Diversification!

Re:

[Hentes]

Joke's on you, the recording companies have already patented that.

Re:

[Mystakaphoros]

Cheaper than monkeys on synthesizers, that's for sure!

Re:

[agrif]

In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he's the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He's the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain – not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps.

-- Accelerando [antipope.org] , by Charles Stross

Re:

[Jason Levine]

Quick, somebody patent that idea so that the RIAA can't implement it!

"I know you wrote this original tune, but our DarwinTunes server farm came up with that three years ago. You owe us $1,000,000 for selling CDs with our tune on it."

So it's...

[a90Tj2P7]

Survival of the phattest?

Original Article from 2009

[mastershake82]

I knew this seemed familiar, turns out there was a post for this site on Slashdot in 2009 as well: Music By Natural Selection [slashdot.org]

Re:

[tjp]

That would be why it was linked in the summary.

Re:Original Article from 2009

[maccallr]

Yeah that 2009 post was my doing - this new one is "organic". The main thing we've added since then is the re-rating of the loops to assess the increase or otherwise of musical appeal through the generations, and to investigate why it slowed down.

New musical options

[ubrgeek]

> Starting form [sic] a garble, after several generations producing something that is actually melodic and listen-able.

Britney Spears, Hansen and a host of other lousy singers and now dancing for joy at the news.

Silence is golden

[Kozz]

Musicians also know that musical compositions benefit from the appropriate amount of silence between notes. If this algorithm were tweaked a bit to include some relative silence here and there, I think it would help the "listenable" factor. Take the final tune for example, and imagine a four-count measure that contained only one note or instrument (or even bass drum-like sound) playing eighth notes on beats 1,2,3,4. It'd create some anticipation, I think. This is the electronic equivalent of "white guy syndrome" -- too many notes!

Re:Silence is golden

[maccallr]

No way are we billing it as machine generated music - the PNAS paper title and website tagline are pretty clear about the role of the consumer/listener.

We thought it would be interesting to test just how far listener-selection can get. Seems like quite far, but in its current state it's obviously not music that will provoke a particularly profound response. This tallies with your comments about the music industry.

Re:

[smolloy]

Don't respond to the AC trolls :)

I was much more interested in seeing your (you are the guy who put this together, right?) reply to the GP post

Re:

[maccallr]

Thanks, I had a stab at it (you meant this comment [slashdot.org]?)

Re:

[smolloy]

Actually, I was thinking about the comment immediately above the AC you replied to. The one about allowing periods of silence to emerge in the track [slashdot.org].

Re:

[maccallr]

Ah well, yes, actually there is plenty of scope for audio white space in the DarwinTunes GP representation. Loops do tend to be rather busy though - could be a consequence of either selection or biases in the representation. Thanks for your interest!

I have an idea

[kelemvor4]

Apply this to top 40 songs and turn them into music as well...

Impossible

[Pinky]

I believe this music has an intelligent designer. Such complex and wonderful music couldn't possibly have arisen by chance. It would be on the same order of magnitude as a tornado blowing through a junkyard assembling a tight little jazz quartet.

Re:

[Mekan]

I believe this music has an intelligent designer. Such complex and wonderful music couldn't possibly have arisen by chance. It would be on the same order of magnitude as a tornado blowing through a junkyard assembling a tight little jazz quartet.

Actually this music did have a number of intelligent designers. The selection of what sounded good was done be men and women. Designing 'art' through random variation is not new at all.

Re:

[bane2571]

I think what is important here is that they applied evolutionary alogirthms to music A LOT for A LONG TIME. Somehting that I personally haven't heard of being done anywhere else.

Re:

[maccallr]

exactly, and one more thing - the selection is pretty close natural selection because multiple raters in isolation provide the feedback.

Obviously the music stays fairly saccharine (but now less so than I had imagined) but with enough people you could speciate/split into sub-populations and get more edgy (literally!) music.

linux.fm

[slyrat]

This reminds me of linux.fm [linux.fm], which is the kernal as a radio station. Maybe a bit off topic but there you go.

"Natural Selection"

[mfwitten]

Darwinian evolution by natural selection.

There is only one kind of evolution in this Universe: Evolution by variation and selection. Nothing is ever "designed" as per, say, Intelligent Design; everything comes about through an iterative process of variation and selection, which is called evolution. This applies not only to biological systems (which are the most popular example of the evolutionary process in action), but also to social systems, economic systems, physical systems like galaxy formation, etc.

In particular, there is absolutely no good

Re:

[maccallr]

But there's more than one listener - they are generally not in contact with each other - so the selection is not really directional in the sense of one person breeding dogs or roses. It's pretty close to a natural selection environment.

Re:

[pipatron]

Look at it as a piece of sound that has to survive in its environment. The environment here is a lot of humans. The worst sounds die.