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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."
"Given that the only ingredients are sine waves, we're impressed."
This is different from all other sounds, including regular music, how?
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.
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.
Maybe they are trying to evolve their server into one that can handle a slashdot load.
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.
What keeps people from herding it toward an existing copyrighted tune? Even composers accidentally do this all the time.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Update: The icon has loaded.
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.