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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."
No way are we billing it as machine generated music - the PNAS paper title and website tagline are pretty clear about the role of the consumer/listener.
We thought it would be interesting to test just how far listener-selection can get. Seems like quite far, but in its current state it's obviously not music that will provoke a particularly profound response. This tallies with your comments about the music industry.
Yeah that 2009 post was my doing - this new one is "organic". The main thing we've added since then is the re-rating of the loops to assess the increase or otherwise of musical appeal through the generations, and to investigate why it slowed down.