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Music By Natural Selection
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."
Close enough?
Music does not decompose into sine waves, unless we're talking brain waves. This is because music is a perception, unlike sound.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Really? I hope orchestral music counts as music. Bowed strings and brass are closer to sawtooth waves, flutes and woodwinds are squarish. Plucked strings *can* approach sine waves, but you're still going to have harmonics that change the timbre, which really just means "the shape of the wave."
Of course, with the use of synthesizers all over the place now, quite a lot of music makes use of pure and modified waves of all types.
Your brain is not a computer.