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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."

14 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 roadkill-maker · · Score: 5, Funny

      Because they have cosine waves too :-)

      Sounds shifty to me

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

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

      Don't let it phase you.

      --
      http://pinopsida.com
  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.

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

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

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

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

  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. Re:Sine waves? by KumquatOfSolace · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Close enough?

  7. 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.

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

    Update: The icon has loaded.