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DarwinTunes Iterates, Mixes And Culls To Create Listenable Music From Noise
Shipud writes "A collaboration between a group in Imperial College and Media Interaction group in Japan yielded a really cool website: darwintunes.org. The idea is to apply Darwinian-like selection to music. Starting form a garble, after several generations producing something that is actually melodic and listen-able. The selective force being the appeal of the tune to the listener. From the paper published [Monday] (abstract) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 'At any given time, a DarwinTunes population
has 100 loops, each of which is 8 s long. Consumers ratethem on a five-point scale ("I can't stand it" to "I love it") as they are streamed in random order. When 20 loops have been rated,truncation selection is applied whereby the best 10 loops are paired, recombine, and have two daughters each.' Note that in 2009 the creators of darwintunes harnessed the power of Slashdot to help 'evolve' their site."
Am I ever going to see an article on slashdot that I didn't see the day before on reddit?
Why do I keep coming to slashdot to read yesterday's news as if it's today's?
Sure, this'll get modded down, but seriously... slashdot is becoming the news equivalent of one of these.
first post
Ah, so this is what "Starting form a garble" means.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It passed like an April day.
Stick a drum beat over that and we have a Eurovision 2013 winner !
We go applying genetic programing to music as homework assignment at GP class
Ah, the "noise" of data transmission at 14.4kbps. Memories.
110 bps is easier for the human ear to understand though.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
As I recall, an ignorant and insane judge outlawed the use of listening to random musical notes that composers use to listen to to get ideas for new tunes. Surely this should be outlawed also.
Going to grab this software, have it run 24/7 on a Beowulf cluster of servers filled with GPUs. Eventually I will own the copyright in EVERY piece of music not yet in existence!
Survival of the phattest?
I knew this seemed familiar, turns out there was a post for this site on Slashdot in 2009 as well: Music By Natural Selection
> Starting form [sic] a garble, after several generations producing something that is actually melodic and listen-able.
Britney Spears, Hansen and a host of other lousy singers and now dancing for joy at the news.
Bark less. Wag more.
once again, slashdot is extremely late to the party. this project is fucking old as dirt.
Musicians also know that musical compositions benefit from the appropriate amount of silence between notes. If this algorithm were tweaked a bit to include some relative silence here and there, I think it would help the "listenable" factor. Take the final tune for example, and imagine a four-count measure that contained only one note or instrument (or even bass drum-like sound) playing eighth notes on beats 1,2,3,4. It'd create some anticipation, I think. This is the electronic equivalent of "white guy syndrome" -- too many notes!
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Apply this to top 40 songs and turn them into music as well...
I believe this music has an intelligent designer. Such complex and wonderful music couldn't possibly have arisen by chance. It would be on the same order of magnitude as a tornado blowing through a junkyard assembling a tight little jazz quartet.
So someone applied evolutionary algorithms to music? That's hardly new and has been done in a lot of studies... Eg to create music that sounds like other composers
"I can't stand it"
Little known fact: Dubstep actually comes from limiting the number of iterations.
This reminds me of linux.fm, which is the kernal as a radio station. Maybe a bit off topic but there you go.
Darwinian evolution by natural selection.
There is only one kind of evolution in this Universe: Evolution by variation and selection. Nothing is ever "designed" as per, say, Intelligent Design; everything comes about through an iterative process of variation and selection, which is called evolution. This applies not only to biological systems (which are the most popular example of the evolutionary process in action), but also to social systems, economic systems, physical systems like galaxy formation, etc.
In particular, there is absolutely no good reason for the "natural" qualifier (or especially that stupid "artificial" qualifier). Everything is natural. At best, the word "natural" is intended to mean "mindless", but evolution became "mindful" as soon as the first brain turned on; something like the brain just allows for the processes of variation and selection to be more sophisticated (put another way, human beings are just as much a part of this Universe as anything else).
Indeed, DarwinTunes even uses people to do the selecting.
Not sure what's so Darwanian about this. An intelligence (i.e. the listerner) is obviously involved, and it is this intelligence which is exercising its objective preference to do the selection. This is nothing more than intelligent-design using a bit of trail-and-error and music synthesis!
But there's more than one listener - they are generally not in contact with each other - so the selection is not really directional in the sense of one person breeding dogs or roses. It's pretty close to a natural selection environment.
Evolutionary algorithms have been applied to music and art for years. This work is not original. I haven't read the article, but I heard this being presented as such on Radio 4 a few days ago (in the UK).
For example, see the evomusart conferences:
http://evostar.dei.uc.pt/2012/programme-2/evomusart/
I'm not knocking their work, I haven't examined it in detail, but just thought it fair to all the researchers in evolutionary art and music (I am not one of them) to point this out.
RS
Look at it as a piece of sound that has to survive in its environment. The environment here is a lot of humans. The worst sounds die.
c++;