Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

33 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Sine waves by ceoyoyo · · Score: 4, Funny

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

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

    1. Re:Sine waves by raymansean · · Score: 5, Funny

      Because they have cosine waves too :-)

      --
      insert inflammatory comment here!
    2. 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.
    3. Re:Sine waves by roadkill-maker · · Score: 5, Funny

      Because they have cosine waves too :-)

      Sounds shifty to me

    4. Re:Sine waves by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      More importantly, they are not asinine ...

    5. Re:Sine waves by kurzweilfreak · · Score: 5, Funny

      Where the hell were you in the 80's? o.O

      --

      kurzweil_freak

      5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student

      Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.

    6. 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.

    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).

    8. Re:Sine waves by Tablizer · · Score: 2, Funny

      Because they have cosine waves too :-)

      Sounds shifty to me

      Dude, that was an offbeat comment.
           

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    9. Re:Sine waves by fbjon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.
    10. Re:Sine waves by Darinbob · · Score: 2, Funny

      This seems somewhat tangential.

    11. Re:Sine waves by atomicthumbs · · Score: 5, Funny

      Don't let it phase you.

      --
      http://pinopsida.com
    12. Re:Sine waves by FiloEleven · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.
  2. Already slashdotted ? by PIBM · · Score: 2, Funny

    No reply yet and the website can't even load.. now I understand why we don't RTFA!

    1. Re:Already slashdotted ? by RendonWI · · Score: 5, Funny

      Maybe they are trying to evolve their server into one that can handle a slashdot load.

    2. 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.

    3. Re:Already slashdotted ? by paxcoder · · Score: 5, Funny

      Update: The icon has loaded.

  3. 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.

    1. Re:Sine waves? by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 2, Funny

      It's called country music.

      Well, technically it could be represented by sine waves, but the sine waves refused to represent THAT!

      It's doable, you just need to use sine waves that are wearing cowboy hats.

    2. Re:Sine waves? by Vintermann · · Score: 2, Interesting

      How about an infinite piece of non-repeating music, consisting of say, a beep at every prime second and silence otherwise?

      --
      xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
    3. Re:Sine waves? by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 3, Interesting

      How about an infinite piece of non-repeating music, consisting of say, a beep at every prime second and silence otherwise?

      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.

    4. Re:Sine waves? by KumquatOfSolace · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Close enough?

    5. Re:Sine waves? by Beardo+the+Bearded · · Score: 3, Funny

      That would be...

      *sunglasses*...

      cowsine

      YEEAAAAAAAHH!

      --

      ---
      ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
    6. Re:Sine waves? by mcpkaaos · · Score: 2, Funny

      Warning: if you follow the parent's link you will be Ricker Rolled.

      --
      It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
  4. 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.

    1. Re:WARNING: AntivirusXP by cl0s · · Score: 5, Funny

      Thanks for the warning.. I was trying to install it using Wine.

  5. If You're Looking for an Introduction to This by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A long time ago when I was learning lisp, I worked through an interesting book by Heinrich Taube called Notes from the Metalevel. A very enlightening and interesting work for people interested in both music theory and computer science.

    --
    My work here is dung.
  6. copyright? by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What keeps people from herding it toward an existing copyrighted tune? Even composers accidentally do this all the time.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  7. Careful what you ask for! by FlyByPC · · Score: 2, Funny

    >...but now things have gone quiet and we'd really appreciate some Slashdotter idle time.

    Your wish is our Slashdotting! That's a name-brand CPU cooling solution you're running, right? Gooood.

    --
    Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
  8. grammidity by jefu · · Score: 3, 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 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.

  9. Re:Isn't this the opposite of evolution? by Vintermann · · Score: 2, Funny

    Polytheism in a nutshell!

    --
    xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
  10. 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.