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Music By Natural Selection

Posted by samzenpus on from the survival-of-the-grooviest dept.

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."

8 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Sine waves? by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 3, Informative

    Given that the only ingredients are sine waves, we're impressed.

    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.

  2. WARNING: AntivirusXP by BabaChazz · · 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.

  3. Re:Sine waves by Qzukk · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is different from all other sounds, including regular music, how?

    Square waves, triangle waves, sawtooth waves, 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.

    --
    If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
  4. Re:Already slashdotted ? by maccallr · · 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

    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.

  5. Re:Sine waves by okmijnuhb · · Score: 5, Informative
    Lots of music makes use of square waves. Distortion guitar is essentially a square wave. It starts as similar to a sine wave, the guitar amplifier or processor clips it into a square wave.

    A square wave is a sine wave with added sine waves of odd harmonics to the fundamental.

  6. No paid ads by maccallr · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is an academic site and there are no paid ads. It hasn't been compromised either, as far as I can tell.

    1. Re:No paid ads by BabaChazz · · 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.

  7. Re:Sine waves by thestuckmud · · Score: 2, 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 is an example at approximately two octaves above middle C (the eighth fret on a guitar's high E string).